v0.4.0 - Links, Dictionary property, and more

Backwards-Incompatible Changes

• Container properties no longer use an empty container as their _class_default; instead, the class default is properties.undefined, like all other built-in property types. This gives consistent behavior across all built-in property defaults. It also avoids unexpected problems with validation outlined in #169. (See #219)

  In order to update code from properties v0.3.5 to v0.4.0, you may simply add the appropriate default on each container property. For example:

  import properties
  assert properties.__version__ == '0.3.5'
  
  class MyClass(properties.HasProperties):
  
      my_list = properties.List(
          doc='List of strings',
          prop=properties.String(''),
      )

  behaves identically to

  import properties
  assert properties.__version__ == '0.4.0'
  
  class MyClass(properties.HasProperties):
  
      my_list = properties.List(
          doc='List of strings',
          prop=properties.String(''),
          default=list,
      )

Major New Features

• New Dictionary property. (See #188, issue #165)
• link and directional_link objects allow values for properties (and traits) across HasProperties (and HasTraits) instances to be linked. The API for links mimics that from traitlets: http://traitlets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/utils.html#links. (See #155)
• properties.Bool has been renamed properties.Boolean to normalize naming conventions across the library (e.g. the integer property is properties.Integer, not property.Int). (See #209)

Minor Changes

• Properties may now be private (i.e. names may begin with underscore). (See #194, issue #191)
• Container properties may now leave prop unspecified for untyped contents. (See #188)
• Array properties:
  • shape may now be unspecified (if set to None) or have multiple valid values (if set to a set of valid shapes). Vector array properties may also specify specific shapes, as long as the second dimension is correct. (See #195, issue #192)
  • complex is now a valid dtype. (See #215, issue #208)
• Dynamic properties:
  • May be serialized with a HasProperties instance by specifying save_dynamic=True. (See #202)
  • No longer raise an error if they evaluate to None/undefined. (See #187, issue #173)
• Renamed properties now have an option to not raise a warning. (See #203, issue #201)
• stop_recursion_with util function has been deprecated. (See #204, issue #168)
• Docstring improvements:
  • __IPYTHON__ interrogation to determine sphinx or plain text formatting. (See #156)
  • Better wording on limited-size container properties. (See #185, issue #178)
  • Custom docs for renamed properties. (See #207)

Bug Fixes

• For container properties, when an instance of a subclass of the base container type are assigned to a property, their class is now maintained (e.g. OrderedDict is no longer coerced to standard dict on validate). (See #221)
• default value validation no longer fails due to the order which property attributes are set. (See #186, issue #177)
• properties.copy now maintains classes of the original. (See #184, issue #175)
• Union properties with required=False no longer fail validation when unset. (See #199, issue #198)
• Deserialization from dictionary that includes a renamed property no longer fails. (See #217)
• Conflicts can no longer arise from setting dynamic properties on init. (See #187, issue #173)
• Metaclass setup no longer fails if __setattr__ is overridden. (See #158)
• Sphinx linking for custom property classes now works. (See #156, issue #153)