Create and store an object of a class

Question

I have a class named Employee and another (reg_employee) that instantiates the former class.

I want to know if this code can be improved.

class Employee:

    def __init__(self):
        self.Name = ''
        self.Id = 0
        self.Age = 0
        self.company = 0
        self.title = ''
        self.Level = 0
        self.xp = 0.0
        self.Tasks = []
        self.Projects = []

    def setname(self, name):
        self.Name = name

    def setage(self, age):
        self.Age = age

    def setcompany(self, company):
        self.company = company

    def setxp(self, lvlup):
        self.xp = lvlup

import Employee

class reg_employee:

    def __init__(self):
        self.employees = []

    def read_info(self, name, age, company):
        e = Employee.Employee()
        e.Name = name
        e.Age = age
        e.company = company
        self.employees.append(e)

Answer 1

The code looks fine. However, there are a few things you can do to improve it:

• first, avoid using Capital letters for variable. In Python, they should be named in snake_case;
• use snake_case for setters (e.g., set_name) and getters as well, or use properties instead. See https://www.python-course.eu/python3_properties.php for more information.
• You can avoid instantiating the variable in the __init__.
• If you are using Python 3.X, consider specifying the parameters types and return types.

Here is how I would refactor your code:

class Employee:

    @property
    def name(self):
        return self.__name

    @name.setter
    def name(self, name: str):
        self.__name = name

    @property
    def age(self):
        return self.__age

    @age.setter
    def age(self, age: int):
        self.__age = age

    @property
    def company(self):
        return self.__company

    @company.setter
    def company(self, company: str):
        self.__company = company

    @property
    def xp(self):
        return self.__xp

    @xp.setter
    def xp(self, lvlup: float):
        self.__xp = lvlup

However, you should use setters if you need to perform some checks before assigning the value to the variable (e.g., you want to check that the passed age > 18 or that the title is at least "a bachelor degree", and so forth. If you do not need those checks, you can simply call the variable, for example:

class Employee:

    def __init__(self):
        self.name = ''
        self.id = 0
        self.age = 0
        self.company = 0
        self.title = ''
        self.level = 0
        self.xp = 0.0
        self.tasks = []
        self.projects = []


employee = Empolyee()
employee.name = 'Foo Bar'
employee.age = 30

Instead of using setters or populating the variables one by one, you can further improve the code by passing the parameters to the Employee class constructor:

class Employee:

    def __init__(self, name:str, age:int, company:int, id:int=None, title:str=None,
                 xp=float=None, task:list=None, projects:list=None):
         
        self.name = name
        self.id = id
        self.age = age
        self.company = company
        self.title = title
        self.level = level
        self.xp = xp
        self.tasks = tasks
        self.projects = projects

   # Properties here (getters and setters) ...

Then, read_info will become:

def read_info(self, name, age, company):
    e = Employee.Employee(name=name, age=age, company=company)
    self.employees.append(e)

Update

As highlighted by hjpotter, a more suitable approach in this case would use dataclasses. Therefore, the class can be rewritten as:

from dataclasses import dataclass


@dataclass
class Employee:

    name: str
    age: int
    company: int
    id: int = 0
    title: str = None
    level: int = 0
    xp: float = 0.0
    tasks: list = None
    projects: list = None

The __init__ is created automatically, and a new object can be instantiated as in the previous example:

def read_info(self, name, age, company):
    e = Employee.Employee(name=name, age=age, company=company)
    self.employees.append(e)