Avoid Pylint warning E1101: 'Instance of .. has no .. member' for class with dynamic attributes

Imagine a function which dynamically adds attributes to an object using setattr. The reason for doing so is that I want to map some external structure (e.g. a given parameter tree) to an object:

my_object = SomeClass()
apply_structure(my_object, some_descriptor)
my_object.device1.enabled = True

Technically this works but of course Pylint rightly complains about 'device1' being not a member of SomeClass.

I could disable the warning but that would be bad (because I still want to get the warning in all cases when the attribute does not exist because of misspelling, etc).

Is there a common and legal (Pylint-proof) way to dynamically add members to an object that not leads to warnings?

Alternatively: Can I disable Pylint for just one object rather than a line/block/file?

Explanation:

You might wonder why I should equip an object with member attributes dynamically when I plan to access these attributes in a hard-coded way later.

The reason is: I have a dynamic part of the program (where the decoration happens) and a static part which is specialized for a certain scenario. So I could also create a static class for this scenario but that would be overkill in a lot of situations.

The following specialized code might allow access to some parameter of a device which might be attached to some bus:

class MyDeviceHandler:
   on_get_some_subtree_element(self):
      return _some_internal_value
   on_set_some_subtree_element(self, value):
      _some_internal_value = value

dev = MyDeviceHandler()

decorate_object_with_device_structure(dev, 'some/attached/device')

dev.some.subtree.element = 5       <--- will call the set-callback
x = dev.some.subtree.element       <--- will call the get-callback

So the structure behind 'some/attached/device' might be arbitrary and very complex and I don't want to reproduce it in a class structure.

One way to get rid of this warning would be to create/access a dict based tree:

dev['some']['subtree']['element'] = 5

But this is harder to write and not nice to read - I would only do this to quieten Pylint.

Solution 1:

Just to provide the answer that works for me now - as The Compiler suggested you can add a rule for the problematic class in your projects .pylintrc:

[TYPECHECK]
ignored-classes=Fysom,MyClass

Solution 2:

This page describes the error and gives an easy way to address it directly in the code. tl;dr

Used when an object (variable, function, …) is accessed for a non-existent member.

False positives: This message may report object members that are created dynamically, but exist at the time they are accessed.

A commentor mentions that it can be disabled on a single line at the top of the file with # pylint: disable=no-member. I also found that you can use # pylint: disable=E1101 based on this reddit entry.

Solution 3:

PyLint gives this type of errors on two cases Link:

• Used when an object (variable, function, …) is accessed for a non-existent member.

• False positives: This message may report object members that are created dynamically, but exist at the time they are accessed.

As this error is identified as E1101 error. You can solve the issue by adding the following line in your code.

# pylint: disable=E1101