How can I have app-wise global var in web2py? As the models, controllers and views of web2py are executed for every request, I cannot set a var on the top level scope of these files as that assignment will be re-executed every request and reset the value.
Testing if the variable is already set in the top level scope and setting it conditionally doesn't work either. Nor does it using globals(), which I think is the same actually. One way I found to do it is to set a var on the top level scope of a custom module, but I don't know if my code can depend on this behavior, as it seems this was changed when import_local() was deprecated and it is undocumented. Also I am not sure if this would be reliable depending on the deployment method. For example, it obviously wouldn't work on a bare cgi deploy, as the entire framework get executed every request. But I consider bare cgi a corner case, for MVC we should always have a long running process. What about other deploys, like wsgi on apache? Another consideration is that it seems this approach wouldn't be global per app but global per web2py instance -- this is not ideal but could be circumvented by a name scoping mechanism, like using the app name. (Even then, I my case it could be a security issue). In some cases it would be possible to just store the value in a file (like in the private folder) or in the database, but then it would be persistent and not really a variable in the long running app. The better alternative I found so far is to use cache.ram to store an object and set time_expire=None. I played a bit with this option and it seems to work just fine for my purposes. Are there other/preferred way to have an app level variable in memory? In case you are curious about my use case: I want to store an encryption key in RAM memory only for as long as the app is running, this key cannot go to persistent storage. When the app is started all controllers that depend on this key will report an error until an administrator logs into the app and manually enters a passphrase (which should be stored only in administrator's brain), the app derives the encryption key from the passphrase and keeps it into the server's RAM memory as long as the app is running. Fabiano. -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "web2py-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to web2py+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
