While trying to avoid inheritance in an API that I was working on, I came across this neat trick to perform attribute delegation on composed classes. Let’s say there’s a class called Engine and you want to put an engine instance in a Car. In this case, the car has a classic ‘has a’ (inheritance usually refers to ‘is a’ relationships) relationship with the engine. So, composition makes more sense than inheritance here. Consider this example:

# src.py
from typing import Any


class Engine:
    def __init__(self, name: str, sound: str) -> None:
        self.name = name
        self.sound = sound

    def noise(self) -> str:
        return f"Engine {self.name} goes {self.sound}!"


class Car:
    def __init__(self, engine: Engine, tier: str, price: int) -> None:
        self.engine = engine
        self.tier = tier
        self.price = price

    def info(self) -> dict[str, Any]:
        return {"tier": self.tier, "price": self.price}

Ideally, you’d to use the classes as a good citizen as follows:

engine = Engine("w16", "vroom")
car = Car(engine, "supercar", 3_000_000)

# If you want to access an attribute on the 'engine' instance from the 'car'
# instance, you'll do it like this:

print(car.engine.name)
print(car.engine.sound)

This will print the following:

$ python src.py
w16
vroom

However, I wanted free attribute access, just like we get in inheritance. We should be able to do car.name, not car.engine.name, and get the name of the engine instance. With a little bit of __getattr__ magic, it’s easy to do so:

# src.py
from typing import Any


class Engine:
    def __init__(self, name: str, sound: str) -> None:
        self.name = name
        self.sound = sound

    def noise(self) -> str:
        return f"Engine {self.name} goes {self.sound}!"


class Car:
    def __init__(self, engine: Engine, tier: str, price: int) -> None:
        self.engine = engine
        self.tier = tier
        self.price = price

    def info(self) -> dict[str, Any]:
        return {"tier": self.tier, "price": self.price}

    # NOTE: This is new!!
    def __getattr__(self, attr: str) -> Any:
        return getattr(self.engine, attr)

This snippet is exactly the same as before and the only thing that was added here is the __getattr__ method in the Car class. Whenever you’ll try to access an attribute or a method on an instance of the Car class, the __getattr__ will intervene. It’ll first look for the attribute in the instance of the Car class and if it can’t find it there, then it’ll look for the attribute in the instance of the Engine class; just like type inheritance. This will work in case of method access as well. So now you can use the classes as below:

engine = Engine("w16", "vroom")
car = Car(engine, "supercar", 3_000_000)

print(car.name)  # Actually prints the 'name' of the engine
print(car.sound)  # Prints the 'sound' of the engine
print(car.info())  # Method 'info' is in the 'Car' instance
print(car.noise())  # Method 'noise' is in the 'Engine' instance

This will print:

$ python src.py
w16
vroom
{'tier': 'supercar', 'price': 3000000}
Engine w16 goes vroom!

While this was all fun and dandy, I don’t recommend putting it in any serious code as it can obfuscate the program’s intent and can make obvious things not-so-obvious. Also, in case of attributes and methods with the same names in different classes, this can get hairy. I just found this gymnastics intellectually stimulating.

Complete example with tests

# src.py
import unittest
from typing import Any


class Engine:
    def __init__(self, name: str, sound: str) -> None:
        self.name = name
        self.sound = sound

    def noise(self) -> str:
        return f"Engine {self.name} goes {self.sound}!"


class Car:
    def __init__(self, engine: Engine, tier: str, price: int) -> None:
        self.engine = engine
        self.tier = tier
        self.price = price

    def info(self) -> dict[str, Any]:
        return {"tier": self.tier, "price": self.price}

    def __getattr__(self, attr: str) -> Any:
        return getattr(self.engine, attr)


class Test(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.engine = Engine("w16", "vroom")
        self.car = Car(self.engine, "supercar", 3_000_000)

    def test_auto_delegation(self):
        expected_info = {"tier": "supercar", "price": 3000000}
        expected_noise = "Engine w16 goes vroom!"

        self.assertEqual(self.car.info(), expected_info)
        self.assertEqual(self.car.noise(), expected_noise)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    unittest.main(Test())
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