How to generate pydoc documentation for Google Cloud Endpoints method?

Question

I have a set of APIs that were developed using Google Cloud Endpoints. The API methods look something like this:

@endpoints.method(message_types.VoidMessage, SystemAboutResponse, name="about", http_method="GET")
def about(self, request):
    """
    Returns some simple information about the APIs.

    Example:
      ...
    """
    return SystemAboutResponse(version=API_VERSION)

I would like to use pydoc to generate documentation for the module that contains this method. However, when I do this, the docstring is not preserved due to the use of the endpoints.method decorator.

I have seen answers to other questions that show how to use functools.wraps (eg Python decorator handling docstrings ) when writing your own decorators so that they will preserve the docstring of decorated methods. Is there some way to do this with Google Cloud Endpoints decorators, since I won't have control over the code for these decorators?

Answer 1

I ended up making a local modification to a copy of the endpoints library. The change is in api_config.py, specifically the apiserving_method_decorator function of the method decorator. I added the @wraps decoration to the invoke_remote function contained within apiserving_method_decorator :

def method(request_message=message_types.VoidMessage,
           response_message=message_types.VoidMessage,
           name=None,
           path=None,
           http_method='POST',
           cache_control=None,
           scopes=None,
           audiences=None,
           allowed_client_ids=None,
           auth_level=None):
    # ...

    def apiserving_method_decorator(api_method):
        # ...

        @wraps(api_method)
        def invoke_remote(service_instance, request):
            # ...

I then make sure that this locally modified copy of the endpoints library is in my PYTHONPATH when I run pydoc.