making HTTP request upon class initialization

Question

New to programming, so may be a stupid question. If so, apologies.

I'm writing a class in Python that on initialization makes a get request to an API for a rather large amount of data:

class Foo:
    def __init__(self, params):
        self.params = json.dumps(params)
        self.r = requests.get(api, data=self.params).json()

After initialization, there are a bunch of methods — bar and baz — that are all meant, in my ideal world, to perform different operations on the the JSON that is fetched upon initialization.

When I instantiate the class and call the methods in succession, I do something like this:

test = Foo()
test.bar()
test.baz()

My naive understanding is that test.bar() and test.baz() are performing operations on the same JSON fetched upon instantiation of test and are not making their own API calls. Obviously, the whole thing would be much slower if test.bar() and test.baz() are each making their own requests. Is my understanding correct? Or are test.bar() and test.baz() fetching their own copies of the JSON data?

Answer 1

It entirely depends on the content of the bar and baz functions. They could call requests.get if that's how you write them.

If you're wondering whether or not the __init__ function is called when you call test.bar(), the answer is no, it is not. __init__ is only called when you instantiate a Foo object.