calling structure of functions with many inputs

[kelle]

Right now, we are using positional arguments for functions ingesting data. For functions with a lot of inputs, this becomes quite unwieldy. Should we have a different method? maybe a dictionary?

[kelle]

The example that I'm working on now is actually in SIMPLE and it's for ingesting spectra. Here's the current function definition:

def ingest_spectrum(
    db,
    source,
    spectrum,
    regime,
    telescope,
    instrument,
    mode,
    obs_date,
    reference,
    original_spectrum=None,
    comments=None,
    other_references=None,
    local_spectrum=None,
    raise_error=True,
):

That's eight position arguments. I think maybe all the tabular data (source--local_spectrum), should be in a dictionary.

other thoughts?

[kelle]

or we could make them all keyword arguments and do the error handling ourselves for required values. (e.g, if someone doesn't explicitly give instrument = "Spex", we'll have to return something because instrument is required value for the Spectra table.)

[kelle]

Will and I discussed and came up with this:

from typing import Optional


def ingest_spectrum(
    db: Database,
    *,
    source: str = None,
    spectrum: str = None,
    regime: str = None,
    telescope: str = None,
    instrument: str = None,
    mode: str = None,
    obs_date: str = None,
    reference: str = None,
    original_spectrum: Optional[str] = None,
    comments: Optional[str] = None,
    other_references: Optional[str] = None,
    local_spectrum: Optional[str] = None,
    raise_error: bool = True,
):