For Developers

How does halodrops.__init__ work?

The idea is to minimize the decision-making on the user’s part. The user should be able to run the package with minimal configuration. The package should be able to handle the rest. For this, all functions in the package should ideally have all arguments with default values. The user can override these default values by providing non-default values in a configuration file.

However, some arguments cannot have default values (e.g. data_directory or flight_id). These arguments are mandatory and must be provided by the user within a MANDATORY section in the configuration file. This means that functions in the package that have the same mandatory arguments must always use the same argument name across the whole package (e.g. data_directory should not be called by a different function as data_dir).

The package handles these non-default and mandatory values and executes the functions with the provided arguments.

This __init__ script thus retrieves mandatory and non-default values from the configuration file for functions within the package and its subpackages, and executes those functions with the retrieved arguments.

Functions

__init__ defines several functions:

get_all_defaults(package): This function retrieves the default values of all functions within a package and its subpackages. It returns a dictionary where the keys are the fully qualified names of the functions, and the values are dictionaries containing the default values of the function parameters.

nondefault_values_from_config(config, default_dict): This function retrieves non-default argument values from a configuration file. It returns a dictionary containing the non-default arguments and their corresponding values based on the config file.

get_mandatory_args(function): This function retrieves a list of all arguments that do not have a default value for a given function.

get_mandatory_values_from_config(config, mandatory_args): This function extracts mandatory values from the ‘MANDATORY’ section of a configuration file. It returns a dictionary where the keys are the argument names and the values are the corresponding values from the config file.

Main Execution

The script’s main execution begins by parsing command-line arguments to get the path to a configuration file. It then checks if the provided directory and file exist. If they do, it reads the configuration file.

Next, it retrieves the default values for all functions within the halodrops package using the get_all_defaults function. It then retrieves the non-default values from the configuration file using the nondefault_values_from_config function.

The script then defines a list of functions to execute. For each function, it retrieves the non-default arguments from the previously retrieved non-default values. If the function has mandatory arguments, it retrieves their values from the configuration file using the get_mandatory_values_from_config function.

Finally, the script executes each function with the retrieved arguments.