How do you cast an instance to a derived class?

Question

I am trying to use a little inheritance in a Python program I am working on. I have a base class, User, which implements all of the functionality of a user. I am adding the co

Answer 1

Rather than "casting", I think you really want to create an UnapprovedUser rather than a User when invoking UnapprovedUser.get(). To do that:

Change User.get to actually use the cls argument that's passed-in:

@classmethod
def get(cls, uid):
    ldap_data = LdapUtil.get(uid + ',' + self.base_dn)
    return cls._from_ldap(ldap_data)

You'll need to do something similar in _from_ldap. You didn't list the code for _from_ldap, but I assume that at some point it does something like:

result = User(... blah ...)

You want to replace this with:

result = cls(... blah ...)

Remember: in Python a class object is a callable that constructs instances of that class. So you can use the cls parameter of a classmethod to construct instances of the class used to call the classmethod.