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spine-tools / Spine-Toolbox

Spine Toolbox is an open source Python package to manage data, scenarios and workflows for modelling and simulation. You can have your local workflow, but work as a team through version control and SQL databases.
https://www.tools-for-energy-system-modelling.org/
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
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Toolbox + FlexTool user experience log #2606

Open nelliputkonen opened 4 months ago

nelliputkonen commented 4 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. (Created originally as FlexTool issue, but moved here by request from @soininen)

I encourage other Toolbox + FlexTool users to report here if they experience other "vague" issues that should be known, but are hard to define.

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.

amnanni commented 4 months ago

vague issue: FlexTool ran my scenarios accordingly and created new results but for some reason the new results did not include the changes I had made to my input database (yes, I had committed the changes). I think this happened because I had left my Toolbox open for several days, since when I closed the program, the model worked normally.

amnanni commented 3 months ago

sometimes some added parameters just disappear: I was doing final checks to my model when I found out that quite a chunk of parameters was mysteriously missing. I then started readding them but flextool says "The value of parameter 'lifetime' for entity 'battery' is already specified." which I definitely agree with but it doesn't show up anywhere? I'm certain I have all the parameters and objects and alternatives etc selected. This has happened to me before too but this time I'm positive it's not on me. Finally the whole FlexTool crashed and I'll see what happens when I reopen it.

jkiviluo commented 3 months ago

@amnanni Do you have the latest Spine Toolbox from the master branch? I think this issue may have been addressed at some point.

amnanni commented 2 months ago

I wanted to have two different input databases open in different tabs in the Spine DB editor to take example from the other database, and I think this has worked well previously. However, this time the alternative_name list was from the wrong input database even though the alternative tree showed the correct alternatives. When I closed the other tab, everything worked fine again.

EDIT: This only happened when I had my two tabs in two different screens in separate windows, but when I had them both in one screen and only one Editor window opened, above issue did not appear.

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(I have the latest Spine Toolbox and FlexTool versions)