Python super() behavior not dependable

Question

For some reason, the super() method is not always behaving as expected, opting to return:

TypeError(\'super(type, obj): obj must be an instance or          


        

Answer 1

I'm not sure why the error is happening, but as an aid to debugging you could wrap the call to super in a try/except block and do a data dump when the exception is raised. Something like this:

class Retrieval(DBConnection.DBAdminConnection): 
    def __init__(self, username=None, password=None, unique_key=None):
        try:
            super(Retrieval,self).__init__()
        except TypeError, e:
            print "Failure initialising Retrieval --> self: %r"
            raise
        if username and password:
            self.username = username
            self.user.login(username,password, config.DATABASE)
            if self.user.error:
                raise UserLoginError(username)
        self.unique_key = unique_key