Factory pattern in python

What is factory pattern all about? It introduces abstraction. In other words: helps software developers with the problem of creating objects without knowing exact class of the object that will be created.

Why use it? From programmers stack exchange:

(…) they allow the project to follow the SOLID principles more closely. In particular, the interface segregation and dependency inversion principles.

Factories and interfaces allow for a lot more long term flexibility. It allows for a more decoupled - and therefore more testable - design. (…)

  • It allows you to introduce an IoC container easily
  • It makes your code more testable as you can mock interfaces
  • It gives you a lot more flexibility when it comes time to change the application (i.e. you can create new implementations without changing the dependent code)

As we know why to use it let’s jump into the code:

class BaseArchive(object):
    EXTENSION = None

    def __init__(self, location_path, files_to_pack):
        self.location_path = location_path
        self.files_to_pack = files_to_pack

    def generate(self):
        raise NotImplementedError()

At first, I created a simple base class to have a common interface for all archive classes. There is nothing sophisticated here: only setting up all necessary arguments in __init__ and telling that all children of BaseArchive have to implement generate method. Let’s look how these children look like:

from zipfile import ZipFile
import tarfile


class ZIPArchive(BaseArchive):
    EXTENSION = 'zip'

    def generate(self):
        with ZipFile('{}.{}'.format(self.location_path, self.EXTENSION), 'w') as zip_file:
            for file_ in self.files_to_pack:
                zip_file.write(file_)


class TARArchive(BaseArchive):
    EXTENSION = 'tar'

    def generate(self):
        with tarfile.open('{}.{}'.format(self.location_path, self.EXTENSION), 'w') as tar_file:
            for file_ in self.files_to_pack:
                tar_file.add(file_)

ZIPArchive and TARArchive classes have generate method to create archives in given format using ZipFile or tarfile modules from standardlib as follows:

zip_archive = ZIPArchive(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'zip'), ['for_zip'])
zip_archive.generate()
tar_archive = TARArchive(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'tar'), ['for_tar.txt'])
tar_archive.generate()

Then the real fun begins. Say I want to generate archive only by providing path and files to pack into the archive. For this purpose I use something called ArchiveManager which is factory:

class ArchiveManager(object):
    ARCHIVE_ENGINES = [ZIPArchive, TARArchive]

    def __init__(self, location_path, files_to_pack):
        self.location_path = location_path
        _, self.extension = os.path.splitext(location_path)
        self.files_to_pack = files_to_pack
        self.archive_engine = self.choose_archive_engine()

    def choose_archive_engine(self):
        for engine in self.ARCHIVE_ENGINES:
            if engine.check_extenstion(self.extension):
                return engine(self.location_path, self.files_to_pack)

    def create_archive(self):
        self.archive_engine.generate()

Here I have ARCHIVE_ENGINES class attribute for every archive engine that I want to use. Below in __init__ I setup all necessary attributes with extension to use in choose_archive_engine. Here is the place where factory pattern starts to work: I iterate through all engines to check_extenstion and if there is a match I return the correct engine to self.archive_engine. To use that I need to write some more code in BaseArchive:

class BaseArchive(object):

  # rest of the code

  @classmethod
  def check_extenstion(cls,extension):
      return extension == cls.EXTENSION:

This check_extenstion that is classmethod helps me in figuring out which underlying archive class should I use. Thanks to that in ArchiveManager.create_archive I only need to provide self.archive_engine.generate(). This method doesn’t know if there is ZIPArchive or TARArchive class being used.

This was quick introduction how to use factory pattern in python. The code for this is available in this repo. Do you know more usages? Or maybe you don’t agree with what I write- feel free to comment.

Edits (12.08.2016):

Edits (30.07.2017):

Edits (07.06.2018):