Creating an ImageFileCollection with filenames set will create an empty collection

[york-stsci]

If I create a list of FITS files, and then create an ImageFileCollection with filenames set to that list, the created collection ends up being empty. For example,

my_files = glob.glob("/path/to/directory/*.fits")
my_collection = ImageFileCollection(filenames=my_files)

the resulting collection is empty. However, if I instead do:

my_files = glob.glob("/path/to/directory/*.fits")
my_collection = ImageFileCollection(filenames=my_files, location="something_completely_random")

then I get a collection made up of everything in filenames (as long as location is not None). Looking at the init function, it seems that it only checks the value of filenames if location isn't None. Shouldn't it check filenames for a list of files regardless?

[mwcraig]

Thanks for reporting this @york-stsci -- I haven't used image file collections this way myself (explicit list of file names) so getting a report about the behavior is useful.

[hlabathems]

@york-stsci I followed your first example without specifying the location and when I do print(my_collection), the resulting my_collection is non-empty, my_collection is a list of files in my_files. Is this the behavior you were expecting?

[crawfordsm]

Looking at this in a little more detail, the filename attribute is still populated, but when, for example, looking at my_collection.summary is empty when filename is populated but location is None