Enable users to select multiple assessment areas with rose edit

[NParsonsMO]

For both AutoAssess and ESMValTool.

A nice enhancement to have which allows users to turn on or off assessment areas (radiation budget, monsoon, ...) and then have this generated list drive the behaviour of CMEW.

Ideally we want rose buttons that have "select one or more" functionality.

Rose widget currently only allows this select options in Python 2 implementation.

Possible solutions:

• Seek advice from Cylc team

[NParsonsMO]

[princekx]

Emma to update after speaking to Cylc developers.

[ehogan]

There is a Python 3 version of the Rose GUI available at the MO. Use the following command to launch it:

ROSE_EDIT_VERSION=xyz rose edit

I have also been informed that the various UM widgets have been updated to use Python 3 👍

Edited to add: The Python 3 version of the Rose GUI is a little buggy. There is a list of known issues at https://github.com/metomi/rose/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20rose%20edit. If we discover any issues that are not listed there, we should report them! 💪

[ehogan]

Also, if we agree to use the Python 3 version of the Rose GUI we should update the documentation accordingly 👍

[pdearnshaw]

From the comments above I went back to the Oliver Sanders and asked about what the UM support looked like. The current implementation (vn14.2) appears to say, if python2 use an available rose widget, if python3 then no widget available. Oliver has given me a better python3 support mechanism for rose widgets that have been ported to python3, which the widget we want has been.

try:  # python2
    from rose.config_editor.valuewidget.choice import ChoicesValueWidget
except ImportError:  # python3
    from metomi.rose.config_editor.valuewidget.choice import ChoicesValueWidget

Testing this with both the python2 and python3 versions of rose edit shows that the widget can work in both versions.

The only thing I am struggling with now is where the widget python file need to be located, I have tried independently lib/python/widget and meta/lib/python/widget and have had problems with both. Putting the file in both locations simultaneously seems to the be the only working solution which baffles me!!! I think I need to set up something cleaner to test this last part.

[pdearnshaw]

The testing I did above was a bit misleading. It turns out that the python3 widget is not loaded properly in the first instance (the python2 one appears to work fine). Oliver running the same set up confirmed this and is looking into why this is the case. However, somewhere along the line something works (not sure how) and now it never stops working, even when the widget file is (re)moved or add the python3 widget directly in the meta file. This second issue is concerning as it looks like something has been cached and it is not obvious where it has been cached.

[pdearnshaw]

Further investigation shows that there is a very funny interaction between python used in the metadata and python at the workflow level. Firstly, it turns out that any widget code does not need to be in the directory meta/lib/python/widget as recommended, it can be at any location in the meta directory. Secondly, if there is any python file in lib/python then it somehow prevents the reading of python code from the meta directory.

This has been reported to the MetOMI team. Need to keep an eye on this.