Add more useful constructors to S2 classes

[wcoenraads]

Currently, the constructors for most classes (such as FRBCStorageStatus or PEBCEnergyConstraint) are generic and just accept *args and **kwargs. While this works, it's bad for the development experience: you constantly have to refer to the documentation to be able to write correct code.

I will look into ways to generate more useful constructors for these classes.

[lfse-slafleur]

@wcoenraads I was looking at the type hinting for 1 of the decorators used and autocomplete is broken due to a type hinting issue. Which part of the development experience are you looking to improve? Autocomplete, hover over constructors or other aspects?

[wcoenraads]

I'm specifically looking to improve:

• Autocomplete in editors
• Tooltips in editors
• Documentation (which doesn't exist yet but is on our radar)

For all of these, it's much nicer to have a constructor with named and typed parameters instead of *args and **kwargs. Do you have any ideas on on how to accomplish this? I briefly looked into it but stalled (partly due to my lack of pydantic experience).

[lfse-slafleur]

Yeah I have on idea that might work. Specifically this line here: https://github.com/flexiblepower/s2-python/blob/main/src/s2python/validate_values_mixin.py#L62

This is a decorator that is used on every class. However, the result type is -> Type[S2MessageComponent[B_co]]. Apparantly, the Python type checkers think this means we want every class to be of type S2MessageComponent[B_co] instead of the actual class. As in, the type of the class appears to be overwritten. Therefore, IDE's show the documentation of S2MessageComponent instead of the class e.g. FRBCFillLevelTargetProfile which means none of the items in your list show up.

Curious to see how much can be fixed with just changing this type to use a TypeVar to actually denote that the type of the class should remain, although it is bounded to S2MessageComponent[B_co].

[lfse-slafleur]

@wcoenraads Fixed the typing issue I mentioned here: #87

For pycharm, autocompletion of constructors only works with a plugin: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/12861-pydantic
However, this plugin loses track of our classes due to the inheritance structure so it isn't able to rewrite the constructors.

I did notice that this fix of the typing issue will let Pycharm autcomplete on any fields or functions once the object is constructed.

[wcoenraads]

Great, thank you @lfse-slafleur! I'll keep this issue open for me to investigate options for better constructors, but type hinting once the object is constructed is already a huge improvement.

[lfse-slafleur]

Issue was automatically closed when I merged the PR. Opened again.

[lfse-slafleur]

@wcoenraads Not entirely sure what changed (perhaps some more typing simplifications I added at some point) but the constructors appear to be correctly type hinted in pycharm:

Doesn't this now tick all the boxes?

[wcoenraads]

Nice! This also works on my end. I'm also not sure what changed to enable this, but I'm happy it did. Thanks!