MetaAttribute

class astropy.utils.metadata.MetaAttribute(default=None)

Bases: object

Descriptor to define custom attribute which gets stored in the object meta dict and can have a defined default.

This descriptor is intended to provide a convenient way to add attributes to a subclass of a complex class such as Table or NDData.

This requires that the object has an attribute meta which is a dict-like object. The value of the MetaAttribute will be stored in a new dict meta[‘__attributes__’] that is created when required.

Classes that define MetaAttributes are encouraged to support initializing the attributes via the class __init__. For example:

for attr in list(kwargs):
    descr = getattr(self.__class__, attr, None)
    if isinstance(descr, MetaAttribute):
        setattr(self, attr, kwargs.pop(attr))

The name of a MetaAttribute cannot be the same as any of the following:

• Keyword argument in the owner class __init__

• Method or attribute of the “parent class”, where the parent class is taken to be owner.__mro__[1].

Parameters:

default – default value