Every once in awhile in my reading I come across a minor reference to what pythonistas refer to as new-style classes. One of the nice things about new-style classes is the `property` decorators. These property decorators allow you to build getter and setter methods to access object attributes. This is pretty awesome because now you can perform validation at the model/class level whenever you assign a value to a property of an object.

e.g., In one of my projects, I have an attribute named timestamp that takes a `datetime` object. I was concerned about receiving incorrect types from my input because there are alot of ways a programmer can represent the concept of time. Some realistic possibilities of invalid types in my case are:

• `time` objects from the time module
• `string` objects that contain the date and time (and various possible formats)
• `float` or `int` objects that contain a unix timestamp

With a setter method, you can test that the new value being assigned to an attribute is the correct type before assigning it. You can also throw an exception if it’s not. In other words, you can do something like this:

from datetime import datetime

class SomeObject(object):    # new-style classes must be subclassed from object
    _timestamp = None

    @property
    def timestamp(self):
        return self._timestamp

    @timestamp.setter    # the prefix must match the read-only getter func name
    def timestamp(self,value):    # the func name must match the read-only getter func name
        if not isinstance(value, datetime):
            raise ValueError(“Timestamp can only be an instance of Datetime”)
        self._timestamp = value

Go ahead and try it!