Correct way to handle imports?

[mmccthomas]

I’m embarrassed that I should know the answer to this, but realise that I don’t!

If I have a folder structure
Folder A
|

• Folder B
  Module a
  |
• Folder C
  Module b
  What is the Correct way to import Module a from Module b. ?
  To be clear, Folder B and Folder C are both subfolders under Folder A
  I am finding the sys.path.append() method very flaky if I try to move Folder A from Pythonista/Documents to Working_Copy/Documents or Files/Documents.

It seems that every time I come back to my code after a while, the imports are broken.

Help please?

[mmccthomas]

Asking the same questions in a different way:
Is there a method of performing module imports in a multi level folder that will work if the folder is located in Pythonista3/Documents and WorkingCopy/Documents?
My current method involves traversing up the tree from the current file until it finds the Documents folder, then adds the subfolders to sys.path. It just FEELS wrong!

[ftourand-gmail]

I experienced similar situation where imports works ... and after quitting / launching Pythonista, links are broken.
This is the reason I systematically include such lines (sys.path.append(...)) within each .py file (to manually update the path)

I also use WorkingCopy to import files from my private Git repository.
I never tried to work with 2 separate repositories, both included in WorkingCopy, nor 1 in WC and the other in Pythonista local files.

If I had to do it, I would try to consider one as a package (cf PythonModules/site-packages (user) on the left hand side menu) ... and see the Readme.md file in this directory,

I would also try : (based on the assumption that your application is imported from WorkingCopy to Pythonista : External Files; Open ... ; Folder ...; WorkingCopy; MyApp)
APPLI = "Repositories/"
SCRIPT_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(file))
MYAPPDIR = SCRIPT_DIR[0:SCRIPT_DIR.find(APPLI)+len(APPLI)]+"MyApp/"
sys.path.append(MYAPPDIR)

MYLIBDIR = SCRIPT_DIR[0:SCRIPT_DIR.find(APPLI)+len(APPLI)]+"MyLibrary/"
sys.path.append(MYLIBDIR)

Hope it will serve as food for thoughts
Best Regards

[mmccthomas]

Thanks Frederick for your insights.
I think that I came to the same conclusions.
I was adding ‘parent’ and ‘grandparent’ folders to sys.path.
This always looked a bit messy, so I invoked a function residing in site-packages to do the same.
However, this only ever seems to work if my files are located in Pythonista/Documents.
os functions do not work out side of the Pythonista folder structure
I suspect that this is a result of deliberate sandboxing, but it does means that I have to continually pass modified modules to and from Working Copy via Share Sheets.

[ftourand-gmail]

Hello,
Maybe you should modify the PATH ; Pythonista (like Python does) recognises all the subfolders,
includes those 5 lines at the top of each .py files, and you should be able to import module a from module b

import os
import sys
SCRIPT_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(file))
MY_APP_DIR = SCRIPT_DIR[0:SCRIPT_DIR.find(" ... // the keyword for your root directory // ...")+len(" ... idem ...") ]
sys.path.append(MY_APP_DIR)

Best regards
Frederic