Stuck on an issue?

Lightrun Answers was designed to reduce the constant googling that comes with debugging 3rd party libraries. It collects links to all the places you might be looking at while hunting down a tough bug.

And, if you’re still stuck at the end, we’re happy to hop on a call to see how we can help out.

How can typos be caught?

See original GitHub issue

This started with my PR #727. Before implementing another suggestion, I feel like there should first be a rough consensus about what the solution should be.

First, the problem: People make typos. When someone writes Flow(variable_cost=42), the missing s (did you spot it?) is silently ignored and one gets a wrong result. Thus, the suggestion is to catch these typos. Somehow.

The problem is complicated by people wanting to be able to add arbitrary properties to objects. So, print(Flow(my_cool_property=42).my_cool_property) should produce 42.

So, here are some random thoughts about possible aspects of a solution:

When should typos be checked?
- At each single object construction
- When the Model instance is constructured from the energy system
- When solving a model
- With an explicit call to check_for_unknown_properties()
How should the checking work?
- Instead of having Flow.__init__(**kwargs):, only the known properties are available as named arguments. New properties could be added via a special custom_properties argument. (Of course, the name for this argument is open for bike-shedding)
- There could be an internal list of known properties. Everything not known is “bad”. Users could add own properties.
  - …in a global list of known properties
  - …as an argument somewhere somehow to the check itself
What should the result of the check be?
- Exception
- SuspiciousUsageWarning
- a list/dict/… of $SOMETHING that is returned to the caller
- Nothing (the current state of things: no typo checks done)

Uhm… that’s it. These are all the possibilities I could come up with. Feel free to think about this and add more options. If you have the powers to do so, feel free to edit this comment so that there is “a single list of everything”.

No idea how the usual oemof decision making works. Depending on mood, time, and the phase of the moon, I might or might not be able to send a PR for whatever version is preferred.