On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 12:30 PM, John Gordon <gor...@panix.com> wrote: > I'm writing an application that interacts with ldap, and I'm looking > for advice on how to handle the connection. Specifically, how to > close the ldap connection when the application is done. > > I wrote a class to wrap an LDAP connection, similar to this: > > import ldap > import ConfigParser > > class MyLDAPWrapper(object): > > def __init__(self): > > config = ConfigParser.SafeConfigParser() > config.read('sample.conf') > > uri = config.get('LDAP', 'uri') > user = config.get('LDAP', 'user') > password = config.get('LDAP', 'password') > > self.ldapClient = ldap.initialize(uri) > self.ldapClient.simple_bind_s(user, password) > > My question is this: what is the best way to ensure the ldap connection > gets closed when it should? I could write an explicit close() method, > but that seems a bit messy; there would end up being lots of calls to > close() scattered around in my code (primarily inside exception handlers.) > > Or I could write a __del__ method: > > def __del__(self): > self.ldapClient.unbind_s() > > This seems like a much cleaner solution, as I don't ever have to worry > about closing the connection; it gets done automatically.
Yes, but not necessarily in a timely manner. Since its uses reference counting, CPython /just so happens/ to finalize non-cyclically-referenced objects promptly when they go out of scope, but Python-the-language makes no such guarantee, and indeed some of the other Python implementations explicitly disclaim that there may be a significant delay before finalization is performed. > I haven't ever used __del__ before. Are there any 'gotchas' I need to > worry about? In addition to the aforementioned problem regarding portability to other Python implementations, see also the Warning box under: http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#object.__del__ I concur with J.'s context manager suggestion. Cheers, Chris -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list