Discussion: Instead of setting the routes directly to the topology, the generator should return the routes

[arneboockmeyer]

I would like to return the generated routes from the route generator (and the same for all other processing projects) instead of setting them directly to the topology. One potential use case would be to compare projected routes with generated routes.

What do you think, @jeriox @ctiedt @Scretch9 ?

[ctiedt]

Could you maybe implement this feature with a new method like this?

def find_routes(self):
    self.generate_routes()
    return self.topology.routes

This way our existing workflows should not break and you get an easy way to generate routes directly.

[arneboockmeyer]

@ctiedt No, thats not my suggestion. My suggestion is that the generator generates routes and returns them without modifying the yaramo-model. It would be possible to add a method like:

def set_routes(self):
    self.topology.routes = self.generate_routes()

But some should just return the routes.

[jeriox]

@ctiedt No, thats not my suggestion. My suggestion is that the generator generates routes and returns them without modifying the yaramo-model. It would be possible to add a method like:

def set_routes(self):
    self.topology.routes = self.generate_routes()

But some should just return the routes.

I think we didn't really liked the way it was before, because the topology always has an empty list of routes and it was a bit counterintuitive to have the routes laying around separately. Your proposal could ease that, as we could still access the routes via the topology. So I would be okay with that

[arneboockmeyer]

Sorry, but I don't understand your point. Before that change I usually had

generator = RouteGenerator()
topology.routes = generator.generate_routes()

in my code. Then there is no empty list and no separately storing of the routes - but I could do that, for example to compare routes from the generator and from PlanPro.

I will create a pull request as suggestion.