String representation of classes that hold configuration values about openff-evaluator HOT 6 CLOSED

I was wondering whether other projects rely on this mixin idea or not, and yep, it's common! Great, I didn't think of this possibility.

Some examples:

• EasyReprMixin by hangtwenty
• More mixins in textblob

We could also use reprlib, which I have just discovered. Man, the standard library is vast. From the docs:

The reprlib module provides a means for producing object representations with limits on the size of the resulting strings. This is used in the Python debugger and may be useful in other contexts as well.

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This will be automatically handled once #226 is closed as pydantic provides this for free by default.

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Thanks for the fantastic feedback!

Because I've always developed, ran and stepped through all of my code and examples directly in an IDE (currently PyCharm) I've never really used the str and repr representations because the debugger gives a full object hierarchy - so this need and use for them is great to know about!

Absolutely a PR would be most welcome to fix up the many instances I've missed! I wonder if we could just use a simple mix-in with an implementation similar to your ComputeResourcesRepr to automate this cleanly in the bulk of cases (at least, those that implement __getstate__ which should be most)?

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I wonder if we could just use a simple mix-in with an implementation similar to your ComputeResourcesRepr to automate this cleanly in the bulk of cases?

Given that .__getstate__() is implemented the same way across all involved instances (returns a dict with string-representable keys and values), I'd say that yes, a Representable class only implementing __str__ and __repr__ for mixins would be enough. It could even check for the existence of __getstate__ and throw a warning otherwise, maybe?

edit: The mixin would have to define abstract methods for required definitions in the children classes.

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I was wondering whether other projects rely on this mixin idea or not, and yep, it's common! Great, I didn't think of this possibility.

Some examples:

• EasyReprMixin by hangtwenty
• More mixins in textblob

We could also use reprlib, which I have just discovered. Man, the standard library is vast. From the docs:

The reprlib module provides a means for producing object representations with limits on the size of the resulting strings. This is used in the Python debugger and may be useful in other contexts as well.

That's good to hear! And it sounds like this should be pretty simple to add in which is great!

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I have just found about __qualname__, which might be what we need here instead of manually concatenating __module__, __class__.__name__ etc.

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