3.2 Option cooperation

When the optparser argument of the parse() method is specified, the same option may be controlled by command line switches or configuration file settings. To enable the cooperation of an option, the destination attribute name must be the same for both the command line parser option and the configuration parser option.

The cooperation is designed so that command line switches have priority over configuration file settings. IMPORTANT: when adding options to the command line parser using the add_option() method, omit the default argument. If it is not omitted the configuration file setting will never be used!

Many of the arguments of the configuration file parser add_option() method may be omitted if they were specified when the option was added to the command line parser. When the parse() method of the configuration file parser is invoked they will be copied from the command line parser options to the configuration file parser options. Sharing of arguments in the add_option() method is not bidirectional. The following is a list of arguments which may be shared:

Option cooperation cross reference information is added to the help text associated with both the command line and configuration file parsers. In the case of the command line option help, the information states the existance of the configuration file option. In the case of the configuration file option help, the information states the existance of the associated command line option.

# file: coop_opt.ini
timeout = 10

import optparse, cfgparse
o = optparse.OptionParser()
c = cfgparse.ConfigParser()

c.add_optparse_help_option(o)
o.add_option('--timeout', type='int', 
             help='Time between retries in seconds.')
c.add_option('timeout')
c.add_file('coop_opt.ini')

(opts,args) = c.parse(o)

print "timeout:",opts.timeout

$ python coop_opt.py
timeout: 10

$ python coop_opt.py --timeout=5
timeout: 5

$ python coop_opt.py --help
usage: coop_opt.py [options]

options:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  --cfghelp          Show configuration file help and exit.
  --timeout=TIMEOUT  Time between retries in seconds.  See also 'timeout'
                     option in configuration file help.

$ python coop_opt.py --cfghelp
Configuration file options:
  timeout=TIMEOUT  Time between retries in seconds.  See also '--timeout'
                   command line switch.