==============
Context Locals
==============

.. module:: werkzeug.local

Sooner or later you have some things you want to have in every single view
or helper function or whatever.  In PHP the way to go are global
variables.  However, that isn't possible in WSGI applications without a
major drawback:  As soon as you operate on the global namespace your
application isn't thread-safe any longer.

The Python standard library has a concept called "thread locals" (or thread-local
data). A thread local is a global object in which you can put stuff in and get back
later in a thread-safe and thread-specific way.  That means that whenever you set
or get a value on a thread local object, the thread local object checks in which
thread you are and retrieves the value corresponding to your thread (if one exists).
So, you won't accidentally get another thread's data.

This approach, however, has a few disadvantages.  For example, besides threads,
there are other types of concurrency in Python.  A very popular one
is greenlets.  Also, whether every request gets its own thread is not
guaranteed in WSGI.  It could be that a request is reusing a thread from
a previous request, and hence data is left over in the thread local object.

Werkzeug provides its own implementation of local data storage called `werkzeug.local`.
This approach provides a similar functionality to thread locals but also works with
greenlets.

Here's a simple example of how one could use werkzeug.local::

    from werkzeug.local import Local, LocalManager

    local = Local()
    local_manager = LocalManager([local])

    def application(environ, start_response):
        local.request = request = Request(environ)
        ...

    application = local_manager.make_middleware(application)

This binds the request to `local.request`.  Every other piece of code executed
after this assignment in the same context can safely access local.request and
will get the same request object.  The `make_middleware` method on the local
manager ensures that all references to the local objects are cleared up after
the request.

The same context means the same greenlet (if you're using greenlets) in
the same thread and same process.

If a request object is not yet set on the local object and you try to
access it, you will get an `AttributeError`.  You can use `getattr` to avoid
that::

    def get_request():
        return getattr(local, 'request', None)

This will try to get the request or return `None` if the request is not
(yet?) available.

Note that local objects cannot manage themselves, for that you need a local
manager.  You can pass a local manager multiple locals or add additionals
later by appending them to `manager.locals` and every time the manager
cleans up it will clean up all the data left in the locals for this
context.

.. autofunction:: release_local

.. autoclass:: LocalManager
   :members: cleanup, make_middleware, middleware, get_ident

.. autoclass:: LocalStack
   :members: push, pop, top

.. autoclass:: LocalProxy
   :members: _get_current_object

   Keep in mind that ``repr()`` is also forwarded, so if you want to find
   out if you are dealing with a proxy you can do an ``isinstance()`` check:

   .. sourcecode:: pycon

       >>> from werkzeug.local import LocalProxy
       >>> isinstance(request, LocalProxy)
       True

   You can also create proxy objects by hand:

   .. sourcecode:: python

       from werkzeug.local import Local, LocalProxy
       local = Local()
       request = LocalProxy(local, 'request')