Hi folks, I have a very general question/clarification concerning the importing and handling of the prefect

context

object. Is there a difference between importing the

context

globally vs from within a task ? i.e.

import prefect

@task
def t():
    prefect.context.get("...")

vs

@task
def t():
    import prefect
    prefect.context.get("...")

Also in a good portion of the docs the

context

is used as

prefect.context

- is that purely for readability reasons or is there a side effect for using

from prefect import context

that one should be aware of ? (My current intuition/understanding is that there shouldn't be any difference here)

Hi @Marwan Sarieddine — there shouldn’t be a difference here. I think it’s probably safer to

import prefect

instead of doing

from prefect import context

but I would have to read more about how python populates the module at import-time to know for sure.

Hi @Zanie thanks for your prompt response - and as far as importing globally vs locally you also see no difference there right ?

Yep!

Hi @Zanie This topic came up in a discussion between @Marwan Sarieddine and me and I could have sworn I had read that one had to be careful with the context object. I’m trying to find it and perhaps this is issue is close. It’s obviously very old. https://github.com/PrefectHQ/prefect/issues/1710

Ah yeah — it is possible that you’ll run into pickling problems. It seems like the error message should be clear if that happens though.

Thanks for confirming!