Add cellsVisualizationSpacingMultipler attributes to netpyne.metadata

[lrebscher]

Parameter defined in Netpyne-UI:

NetPyNE-UI/netpyne_ui/netpyne_geppetto.py

Line 45 in fb4faa8

metadata['netParams']['children']['cellsVisualizationSpacingMultiplierX'] = {

These weren't yet added to netpyne.metadata, currently we dynamically extend it

But that is likely to cause some issues, one I stumbled upon when I start with an empty project and export model to Python, I get an exception thrown by netpyne (see screen attached)

[salvadord]

Added this property to netParams.py and to metadata.py. However, I made it a single list variable instead of 3 separate ones ... since this is an ugly ad hoc feature, that pollutes the code and should be eventually removed ;) :

suny-downstate-medical-center/netpyne@bbc45dd

I also update the netpyne_workspace hnn examples accordingly:

Neurosim-lab/netpyne_workspace@f1d5dac

This will require the netpyne_UI side to be updated to use a list variable, instead of 3 variables. I assume it will be straight forward, but if too much complication, let me know and I'll separate into 3 variables again.

[lrebscher]

It's surprisingly not straightforward if we want to provide a field that has robust input validation :D

Currently, we don't have much freedom in the way frontend input maps to netpyne fields, the current synchronization mechanism is very opinionated and coupled to how an input field must look like. We only support a range of different input types and for everything else we have to do some custom handling.

Out of the box, we could just use one field and let the user set a value "[1,2,4]" but that's not a user friendly way to enter input, also it requires some custom rules to verify input

My suggestion would be to keep the three variables and find out how we can remove it completely

Usually this wouldn't be a problem. I could just create three explicit fields in the frontend and update only a specific index in the list in simConfig, but that's not so easy with the current impl we have here.

Update: talked with Filppo and there is a way to only update a single index (e.g. metadata['netParams']['children']['cellsVisualizationSpacingMultiplier'][0]), so we can have three fields in the frontend and map each field to one index, will try this out!

[lrebscher]

@salvadord the issue here is that we use the same label for each field so we have "Cells visualization spacing multiplier (X, Y, Z)" for each field. To keep it simple I would suggest to go with my previous suggestion and stick with the three explicit attributes

[salvadord]

Can we just remove this from the GUI frontend? I know it's used in the HNN example, but the value is already set in the script/code, and doesn't need to be modified by the user; nor will it be used by any other model. So the netParams.cellsVisualizationSpacingMultiplier can just be used in the GUI backend, but doesn't really need to be editable.

[lrebscher]

Makes sense, I removed it :)