Fix issue #293 NUOPC_CompAttributeIngest failure

[danrosen25]

Fix #293
Append a token lists into single spaced string

[theurich]

This looks good to me. The way I interpret the new code, the use ends up with a single string value for both cases:

<COMP>_attributes::
      restart_fh = 0.05,0.25,0.5,3,6
 ::

and

<COMP>_attributes::
      restart_fh = 0.05, 0.25, 0.5, 3, 6
 ::

I think that is consistent behavior for how the non-HConfig Attribute handling is working string based.

[danrosen25]

@theurich It does but note that

<COMP>_attributes::
      restart_fh = 0.05, 0.25, 0.5, 3, 6
 ::

and

<COMP>_attributes::
      restart_fh = 0.05,     0.25,          0.5, 3,  6
 ::

both return 0.05, 0.25, 0.5, 3, 6

So although it works with whitespace now

<COMP>_attributes::
      my_line = I  am  a  sentence  with  double  spacing
 ::

returns I am a sentence with double spacing
and that's not what a user would expect

I had to make a change because the NUOPC Comp UTest was failing.

[danrosen25]

@tclune @NickSzapiro-NOAA
Hi,
I'm looking for user feedback for this change to NUOPC. It's become standard practice to read ESMF Config tables into a FreeFormat then ingest the FreeFormat into component attributes. We discovered a bug in which ESMF Config table rows that include spaces were being completely ignored restart_fh = 0.05, 0.25, 0.5, 3, 6 during this process. This happens because reading config into a FreeFormat treats spaces as column separators, which is how we support tables. When ingesting a FreeFormat into an attribute NUOPC does not know how to handle multiple attribute values for a single key.

This fix will concatenate all of the items with one space between each item, which is then added to the component's attributes. It's not without issues because it will trim all excess white space. See code for specific technical details.

I did play around with ingesting multiple values as a valueList but there was little benefit.

[tclune]

@danrosen25 I doubt this will affect GEOS, but if you want us to test a branch with GEOS, we'll be happy to oblige.

Wish I could say we are entirely HConfig at this point, but production systems will be mostly Config for at least another year, not to mention legacy variants.

[tclune]

Sorry - was assuming this was a change in the underlying ESMF_Config. GEOS itself does not use any NUOPC code, so this should only affect UFS.

[NickSzapiro-NOAA]

Hi @danrosen25. Sorry for the slow reply as I was on PTO.

I'm not aware of any need to maintain white space. It's certainly better to be able to read the attribute (as string then parse)

In the current NUOPC_refdoc, there are two:

NUOPC_CompAttributeGet - string list
NUOPC_CompAttributeGet - integer list

If these are not implemented/supported, maybe this could be noted (only for the ESMF config format?)