FAQ

Show inherited fields/validators

Pydantic models can be subclassed to inherit fields and validators from base classes. Naturally, autodoc_pydantic should also show these members. By default, sphinx autodoc does not include any member from base classes, though. However, sphinx autodoc provides a directive option named :inherited-members: which allows to include all members from all base classes except object (see docs here).

Unfortunately, this will also include all members from pydantic.BaseModel (e.g. copy(), schema() etc…) which is most likely not what one wants. Luckily, :inherited-members: takes a parameter which allows to exclude base classes. Hence, when supplying BaseModel as an argument for :inherited-members:, irrelevant members are ignored:

pythonreSTrendered output

from pydantic import BaseModel


class MyBase(BaseModel):
    """MyBase"""

    field_on_base: str
    """Base Field"""


class MySubclass(MyBase):
    """MySubClass"""

    field_on_subclass: str
    """Subclass field"""

Note

For more, please see the corresponding github issue #32.

Exclude __init__ docstring

If a pydantic model’s documentation rendered by autodoc_pydantic includes the docstring from the pydantic base class or from the model’s __init__ method, it may be due to autodoc’s autoclass_content setting in sphinx’s conf.py.

The configuration below tells Sphinx to include both the class docstring and that of __init__ for auto-documented classes:

autoclass_content = "both"

This behavior does also apply to autodoc_pydantic’s auto-documenters. If you haven’t overwritten the __init__ method in your model, this will look exactly like it has inherited the Pydantic base class docstring. In order to only show the class docstring, change this setting back to “class”:

autoclass_content = "class"

Note

For more, please see the corresponding github issue #58.