Re: [matplotlib-devel] Use of meta on Artist

The problem is that I don't think we can do this for all artists.  Some 
may need to create groupings, or push and pop state even if they are 
"invisible".  For instance, this is used in the SVG backend to create 
named groupings (possibly empty) that are referenced from Javascript to 
provide interactivity.  I think I'd rather keep this to the contained 
solution in the PR and not try to generalize it beyond that.

If we did want to generalize, this would only apply to "leaf node" 
artists, and not artists that simply exist to contain other artists -- 
and conceivably we could implement that using either a decorator or 
explicit chaining to a base class, but in any event it would have to be 
a manual process to determine which artists this would apply to.  We 
could insert a class in the heirarchy of "ConcreteArtist" (or somesuch) 
to handle this.

Mike

On 11/26/2012 06:17 AM, Phil Elson wrote:
> I've just been reviewing a really useful PR 
> (https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/1531) from Pierre 
> Haessig which speeds up the drawing of non-visible artists by bringing 
> the following line to the top of the LineArtist's draw method:
>
>     if self.get_visible() is False:
>         return
>
> This *does* fix the problem (and will fix the problem for all other 
> artists if applied in the same way), but it relies on a developer 
> remembering the rule of thumb that they must always start their draw 
> method with these two (simple) lines. Additionally, testing this 
> functionality is actually quite hard without resorting to timing the 
> execution.
>
> It made we wonder if there was a better approach to fixing this. 
> Having a decorator to do this for you is a good idea, except that a 
> developer would need to remember to decorate their subclass' draw 
> method, so the next level up is to use a metaclass to *always* wrap 
> the draw method with the "if visible" lines.
>
> An example of implementing this (apologies if the code doesn't come 
> out well in the email):
>
>
> class ArtistMeta(type):
>     def __new__(cls, classname, bases, class_dict):
>         # replace the draw method with one which short-circuits if 
> self.visible is False
>         draw_method = class_dict['draw']
>         def draw(self, *args, **kwargs):
>             if self.visible is False:
>                 print 'draw **not** called with 
> visible={}'.format(self.visible)
>                 return
>             else:
>                 return draw_method(self, *args, **kwargs)
>         class_dict['draw'] = draw
>
>         return  type.__new__(cls, classname, bases, class_dict)
>
>
> class Artist(object):
>     __metaclass__ = ArtistMeta
>
>     def __init__(self, visible=True):
>         self.visible = visible
>
>     def draw(self, renderer=None):
>         print 'draw called with visible={}'.format(self.visible)
>         return 'foobar'
>
>
> class SubArtist(Artist):
>     def draw(self, renderer=None):
>         print "subclass' draw method"
>         return Artist.draw(self, renderer=renderer)
>
>
>
>
> With the following results:
>
>
> >>> a = Artist().draw('wibble')
> draw called with visible=True
>
> >>> b = Artist(False).draw('wibble')
> draw **not** called with visible=False
>
> >>> c = SubArtist(True).draw('wibble')
> subclass' draw method
> draw called with visible=True
>
> >>> d = SubArtist(False).draw('wibble')
> draw **not** called with visible=False
>
>
>
> In my eyes this makes testing the functionality possible without 
> timing (and is therefore an improvement), but I wanted to know how 
> others felt about the approach, and in particular, using more 
> metaclasses in matplotlib (a simple tutorial which I found useful: 
> http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/metaclasses.shtml).
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Phil
>
>
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>
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