Sphinx: autodoc inherited-members won't work for inherited attributes (data members).

[shimizukawa]

autodoc searches for a cached docstring using (namespace, attrname) as search-key, but doesn't check for baseclass-namespace.

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• Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/issue/741
• Originally reported by: Anonymous
• Originally created at: 2011-08-02T17:05:58.754

[shimizukawa]

_From mitar on 2012-01-07 18:21:47+00:00_

Also {{{find_attr_doc}}} seems to not find inherited attributes?

[shimizukawa]

_From mitar on 2012-01-07 20:04:22+00:00_

The problem is also that parser for attributes' doc strings parses only one module. It should also parses modules of all parent classes and combine everything.

[shimizukawa]

_From Jon Waltman on 2012-11-30 15:14:18+00:00_

Issue #1048 was marked as a duplicate of this issue.

[halfak]

I'm currently getting bit by this issue in 1.2.3. https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues/2233 is preventing me from working with 1.3.x. Is there a workaround you might recommend?

[LevN0]

Is there any hope of getting this fixed, or a workaround? As mentioned in #1048 even using autoattribute does not work.

[numberoverzero]

I'm also running into this. For now I'm manually duplicating docstrings, but it would be nice if :inherited-members: worked.

I'm not familiar with the code base at all, but if anyone's willing to point me in a direction I can try to write a fix.

[MatthieuPERIN]

Any news on this feature / bugfix ?

[Dmitrii-I]

I am also awaiting a fix for this, fwiw

[tk0miya]

I don't understand this problem. Could anyone make an example to me? I'll try to fix it if possible.

[davidism]

@tk0miya Here's a very simple example project: sphinx-example.tar.gz.

class Base:
    """The base class."""

    #: A base attribute.
    ham = True

    def eggs(self):
        """A base method."""


class Inherited(Base):
    """The subclass."""

    #: A local attribute.
    foo = 3

    def bar(self):
        """A local method."""

.. autoclass:: example.Inherited
    :inherited-members:

The Base.ham attribute is not present in the docs for Inherited. However, the Base.eggs inherited method is displayed.

[Dmitrii-I]

In my case ham is an instance attribute and I want it to be auto-documented but it is not working.

class Base:
    """The base class."""

    def __init__(self):
        #: A base attribute.
        self.ham = True

    def eggs(self):
        """A base method."""

I am not sure it is even technically possible for Sphinx to auto-document self.ham. As I understood Sphinx finds attributes by code inspection, not actually instantiating the class. And to detect the ham instance attribute it seems to me you need to instantiate the Base class.

[tk0miya]

It seems latest Sphinx (2.0.1) is able to process inherited attributes. On the other hand, inherited-instance attributes are not supported yet (filed as #6415 now).
So I think this issue has been resolved now.

I'm closing this. Please let me know if you're still in problem.

Thanks,

[davidism]

@tk0miya I just tried the example I posted earlier with Sphinx 2.1.0 and this issue still occurs. https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues/741#issuecomment-453832459

6415 and @Dmitrii-I's comment is different, but possibly related.

[tk0miya]

Thank you for comment. my bad. Just reopened. I might give :undoc-members: option on testing...

Inside autodoc, the comment based docstring is strongly coupled with its class. So autodoc considers the docstring for Base.ham is not related with Inherited.ham. As a result, Inherited.ham is detected undocumented variable.

I'll try to fix this again.

[hagenw]

I saw that https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/pull/8548/ was merged and released inside sphinx 3.4.0.

But a simple :inherited-members: does still not include attributes, e.g.

class A(object):

    def __init__(self):
        self.a = a
        r"""My first attribute."""

class B(A):

    def __init__(self):
        self.b = b
        r"""My second attribute."""

.. automodule:: abtest

.. autoclass:: B
    :members:
    :inherited-members: