I've been running into a problem lately where I have an architecture like so:
Main class -> facade/configuration class -> low level logic class. The main class is what the user interacts with. The facade/config class is responsible for loading and managing the lower level classes and providing a consistent interface to the main class. It can be hot swapped in/out to drastically change the functionality of the main class. The low level logic classes are responsible for dealing with domain primitives. The issue I'm having is that I want advanced users to be able to pass extra configuration information to the facade and low level classes if need be, without the signature drastically changing with different facade classes. Currently, I explicitly state parameters as much as possible at each level. To deal with low level logic classes that have a large number of possible options I allow the caller to pass a dictionary of options for that class. This leaves me with signatures that are upwards of 15 arguments long in some cases, the majority of them repeated in classes called from the main class. I've tried using args/kwargs, however I found it difficult to avoid having arguments in my signature re-ordered, and it is also a source of bugs. Has anyone come up with a good solution for dealing with arguments in situations like this where you'd like to encapsulate lower level stuff for neophyte users but make it easily available to advanced users? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
