Docstring inheritance for properties using sphinx's autodoc

Question

I have a class like this:

class MyBase(object):

   x = 3

   """Documentation for property x"""

and another class that inherits it:

class MyObj(MyBase):

   x = 0

When I use sphinx's autodoc to generate documentation,

MyObj.x

is not documented. Is there any way to inherit the docstring from

MyBase.x

? I found DocInherit but since this uses a decorator, it only works for class methods. Any way to do this with properties?

Answer 1

I found a workaround using the property function:

class MyBase(object):
   _x = 3
   x = property( lambda s: s._x, doc="Documentation for property x")

class MyObj(MyBase):
   _x = 0

This is nice in that given an instance variable:

>>> m = MyObj()
>>> m.x
0

one can call help(m) and get proper documentation of property x and sphinx also picks this up correctly.

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