Using Data Only Classes In Python

In a python project recently we added linting tools to the pipeline to try to catch poor coding practice. Most of the "errors" that the linting tools highlighted were things like "does not conform to snake case" or "too many characters (more than 100) in line" .

In addition however, some real problems were highlighted. One was "too many arguments". After Googling this I took the suggestion to group any related arguments together in a class. Since the parameters were all related I created a new class with just an init method and the parameters in the constructor which were passed to properties on the class.

This refactoring however, generated a new error from pylint which was class uses . The new recommendation was that since the new class is just used to store data then I should use the @dataclass decorator. 

The docs for this are here  and implementing it is simple as in the following example:

@dataclass
class MyDataClass:   
    """Class for keeping track of details."""
    name: str
    age: int = 0
    salary: float

Using the dataclass decorator means the fields in the class get data types matching those passed in from the constructor. Under the hood some dunder methods are created to pass the data from the constructor to the fields of the class. 

Using the @dataclass decorator reminds me of the record type in C#. In C# records are actually not a class but not a struct either but they are very similar to creating a class with the @dataclass decorator in Python.