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irena-flextool / flextool

IRENA FlexTool is an energy and power systems model for understanding the role of variable power generation in future energy systems.
https://www.irena.org/energytransition/Energy-System-Models-and-Data/IRENA-FlexTool
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User experience log #176

Closed nelliputkonen closed 7 months ago

nelliputkonen commented 7 months ago

I created this issue to deal with one of those complaints that are very hard to define, yet have great impact on user experience.

19.2.2024: 1) Modified the way electricity trade is modelled and had to remove some nodes and units. Also moved some relationship parameters from one alternative to another. When attempting to remove the alternative that was now empty, also relationship parameters that used to belong to this alternative were deleted. Found no way to avert this and chose to keep and rename alternative.

2) Tried to add 3x electricity export units to model. Firstly tried to duplicate 3x import units. Toolbox only duplicated one. Some extra relationships appeared. Tried to remove them, but they did not clear from the list. Had to restart Toolbox with unable to save uncommited work. Secondly tried to simply create the units by hand and copy-paste the parameters from existing. Again a problem with adding and removing relationships appeared, uncommited work was lost and had to restart. Finally, I added 3 units and their relationships manually, and succeeded. At first and second try, there were some errors indicated as pop-up when attempting to commit, no error messages other than that. Miniconda prompt log is attached: Miniconda_prompt_19022024.txt

On a general note, these type of errors are very common when removing, duplicating or copying to database. The only solution is to lose the work you have been doing and restart Toolbox. The pain is larger for early users because they attempt to keep working after funny stuff like this starts to happen, and can end up losing hours of work. Experience teaches to take the casualties right away when any funny behaviour appears.

soininen commented 7 months ago

This looks more like a Toolbox issue. Perhaps you want to move it there?

nelliputkonen commented 7 months ago

Moved to Toolbox issue tracker: https://github.com/spine-tools/Spine-Toolbox/issues/2606