Checking if function was not called for x amount of time

Question

I didn't find this kind of question anywhere so I'm going to ask it here.

How can I check if some specific function written by me wasn't called for some x amount of time?

Answer 1

You could embed the last called time in the function definition:

def myfun():
  myfun.last_called = datetime.now()
  # … do things

From this point it should be easy to tell when the function was called. Each time it's called it will update its last_called timestamp.

A more general approach would be to define a function decorator to attach the property:

def remembercalltimes(f, *args, **kwargs):
    """A decorator to help a function remember when it was last called."""
    def inner(*args, **kwargs):
        inner.last_called = datetime.now()
        return f(*args, **kwargs)
    return inner

@remembercalltimes
def myfun():
    # … do things

>>> myfun()
>>> myfun.last_called
>>> datetime.datetime(2014, 3, 19, 11, 47, 5, 784833)