Investigating xarray for mtg's properties computation and readability

[GeraultTr]

Investigating xarray for mtg's properties computation and readability.

[pradal]

Thanks!

[GeraultTr]

So as far as I understood, solving this issue would mean to fork open openalea.mtg to modify :

• to modify openalea.mtg.io.Reader to enable xarray import.
• to modify all openalea.mtg.mtg.MTG, openalea.mtg.tree.PropertyTree and openalea.tree.Tree methods for them to work with xarray instead of a dict (namely creating a xproperties() method).
• to understand how the xarray save format .nc can be bound to the MTG class during import (I grasped that current mtg pickle import returns a class, but I don't understand how a dict import returns a class).

I am right on these? Thanks again!

[GeraultTr]

In the simulation_no_C.py file, I started logging and exporting properties using x_array. To me the next step is to understand better the current management of the MTG file :

1. Why is it that you import the xxx.pckl MTG file with pickme and end up with a class and not a dict object?
2. How to achieve this while importing a xxx.nc file that is the format used for xarray?
3. Doing this will compromise the methods of openalea.mtg that will not work with a xarray object. Does it mean recoding everything in these methods?
4. With this strategy, where is the MTG's topological scheme stored, as I've been talking only about properties in the 3 previous points?

Sorry for the long list but I think I need to figure these out to go further on this issue.