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.

Answer 2

As far as I know, docstrings for attributes are not part of Python. When I try it, MyBase.x.__doc__ does not get set to the string beneath it. Docstrings only work on classes, functions and methods. If Sphinx picks up the string underneath x = 3 as a docstring, it's probably doing its own processing of the source code to get that.