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pcdshub / happi

Heuristic Access to Positions of Photon Instruments
https://pcdshub.github.io/happi/master
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Identify Issues with CLI Tools #165

Open ZLLentz opened 4 years ago

ZLLentz commented 4 years ago

Expected Behavior

Users should use the CLI or the IPython interface for adding devices to and editing devices in happi to take advantage of schema checking and to avoid corrupting the database files.

Current Behavior

Many users ignore this and edit the json files directly.

Possible Solution

Figure out why the existing tools are hard to use, document the findings, and propose changes.

ZryletTC commented 4 years ago

For one thing, why aren't all commands listed in the usage output?

ZryletTC commented 4 years ago

I also resort to json editing sometimes because the CLI add function doesn't allow me to set some values like I want them. For example, I think it won't let me set 'args' or 'prefix' to be blank.

klauer commented 4 years ago

Issue @ZryletTC just found:

[2020-09-18 17:55:14] - INFO -  Enter value for kwargs, default={'name': '{{name}}'}, enforce=<class 'dict'>
{'name': '{{name}}', 'n_bounces': 10}
[2020-09-18 17:56:03] - INFO -  Invalid value {'name': '{{name}}', 'n_bounces': 10}

dict-enforced items fail on the CLI as dict('{}') doesn't work. We should probably be using something like:

In [5]: ast.literal_eval("{'name': '{{name}}', 'n_bounces': 10}")
Out[5]: {'name': '{{name}}', 'n_bounces': 10}

In [6]: dict(_)
Out[6]: {'name': '{{name}}', 'n_bounces': 10}