Double fetching of a group when searching for groups

[MathieuLegault1]

When searching for groups the created class is not set properly which cause the group to be fetched a second time when accessing a property.

To Reproduce
Search the groups of an organization

target_portal_groups = gis.groups.search("*", sort_field="title", max_groups=1000)

error:

target_portal_groups[0].title # This will query the portal

Expected behavior
The dictionnary from the initial fetch you be used instead of fetching the object again.

Platform (please complete the following information):

• OS: WIndows 11
• Python API Version: 2.4.2

Additional context
The reason why this happens is the Group object hydrate property is not set correctly when the group dict was provided on initialization.

def __init__(self, gis, groupid, groupdict=None):
    dict.__init__(self)
    self._gis = gis
    self._migrate = None
    self._portal = gis._portal
    self.groupid = groupid
    self.thumbnail = None
    self._workdir = tempfile.gettempdir()
    # groupdict = self._portal.get_group(self.groupid)
    self._hydrated = False
    if groupdict:
        groupdict.update(self.__dict__)
        super(Group, self).update(groupdict)

When the groupdict is provided it updates the group dict with it's properties. But since it doesn't set hydrated to true it will fetch its properties later on.

def __getattr__(self, name):
    if not self._hydrated and not name.startswith("_"):
        self._hydrate()
    if name.startswith("_ipython_"):
        return None  # Skip IPython-specific attributes
    try:
        return dict.__getitem__(self, name)
    except AttributeError:
        raise AttributeError("'%s' object has no attribute '%s'" % (type(self).__name__, name))

If we look at the hydrate function it actually does pretty much the same thing as the initial group creation but it correctly sets the hydrate property.

def _hydrate(self):
    try:
        groupdict = self._portal.get_group(self.groupid)
        self._hydrated = True
        super(Group, self).update(groupdict)
        self.__dict__.update(groupdict)
    except Exception as e:
        raise e

I've checked on my side and the initial call to search the groups returns all the properties of the group (which can be seen when reading the rest api documentation).

https://developers.arcgis.com/rest/users-groups-and-items/group-search/
Returns: A JSON array of group objects. See the response properties for Group.

This is kinda a big bug on our side this will causes a lot of fetches to our organization.

Thanks,
Mathieu

[MathieuLegault1]

I just saw that we can use __getitem__ instead. Is it a possibility to also define __getattribute__ like the Item class does ? This way it wouldn't matter how I access the property ? Leaving it as-is is kind of error-prone since the user doesn't really know it will fetch everything again since it works (but really slow). Feel like having getattribute thats uses the dict properties would fix this.