Inspecting configurations

Field access

Iterating through a Config instance yields the names of the Field attributes it contains. The Config class also supports many dictionary-like methods: keys, items, iterkeys, iteritems, and itervalues.

History

The Config.history attribute contains the history of all changes to the Config instance’s fields. Each Field instance also has a history. The Config.formatHistory method displays the history of a given Field in a more readable format.

Docstrings

Each Field instance is required to have a doc attribute that describes the contents of the field. These doc strings should be complete sentences and should give users of the Config object a good understanding of what the field is and how it will be interpreted and used. Multi-sentence doc strings should have an explicit newline character ("\n") after each sentence; single newlines here do not affect the rendered HTML docs, but they improve the readability of the persisted Config object (as produced by Config.save). Field doc strings are treated as reStructuredText when rendered, but we do not recommend using anything more than very simple formatting in them, to balance the formatting of the rendered HTML and the persisted Config (which just passes through the doc string as-is).

A class docstring can also be provided for the Config class as a whole, although this may be redundant with the class name.

You can use the built-in help function or pydoc command to inspect a Config instance’s doc strings as well as those of its Field attributes.