Simplifying version definitions

[illusional]

Python can dynamically generate classes 😱

We could do some clever stuff to automatically generate these classes, for example:

from abc import ABC, abstractmethod

class BaseClass(ABC):
    def __init__(self, a=1):
        self.a = 1

    @abstractmethod
    def to_override(self):
        pass


class WithInheritedMethod:
    def to_override(self):
        print("Created a class called: " + self.__class__.__name__)


name = "CreatedClass"
globals()[name] = type(name, (WithInheritedMethod, BaseClass), {})

CreatedClass().to_override() # prints "Created a class called: CreatedClass"

We could apply a similar tactic to ToolVersions, for example to create a fully functional tool definition for Gatk4ApplyBqsr for each version of GATK, we could use:

versions = [Gatk_4_0_12, Gatk_4_1_2_0, Gatk_4_1_3_0, Gatk_4_1_4_0]


names = []
for v in versions: 
    # prepare the class name (NB: this is different to what we've used in the past)
    name = f"{Gatk4ApplyBqsrBase.tool(None)}_{v.__name__[5:]}"
    globals()[name] = type(name, (v, Gatk4ApplyBqsrBase, object), {})
    names.append(name)

# This overrides the exports and makes sure ONLY the created classes are exported
__all__ = names

Caveats

It does bring intellisense, pycharm / vscode can't determine that the import actually exists (red squiggly line):