Writing input files

[deltamarnix]

We should be able to write the input files of the quickstart simulation, models, packages in ASCII.

[wpbonelli]

Stubbed a write method in #135. Can soon be hooked into a writer, sketched in #136

[wpbonelli]

#142, #143, #145, #146 get us a bit closer. generic load/write mechanism is ready as well as filename, workspace and path attributes for components. ascii file writer still needs work.

[wpbonelli]

Simple ASCII file writer draft is in for most components (no sim or model namefiles yet). But it's still buggy and the factoring is wrong.

To get this off the ground I wrote a converter layer that takes separate period data arrays and combines/filters them into a sparse dict containing records/keystrings, suitable for list-based input, which is then passed to the writer. This is expensive and gross and list-based input is an MF6IO format detail, therefore it should be handled by the writer, not by the converter. Ideally a converter just

converts unstructured dictionaries into proper classes and back, while validating their contents. (https://catt.rs/en/)

I think the converter should just take instances of our components and return either asdict(component) or component.data.dataset.to_dict().

The writer must then know how to compress DataArrays of various flavors and glom them together into list-based input format.

[wpbonelli]

MODFLOW-ORG/modflow-devtools#228 will make it easier to finally implement sim/model file writing. the parent/child bindings were the difficulty.

[wpbonelli]

With some of the recent work @mjreno has done, input files now look good for the quickstart. There are likely a lot of edge cases that will be ironed out over time, but I'll close this to complete the prototype milestone.