Requests for only the most recent data should be parsed differently

[mroberge]

• HydroFunctions version: 0.1.8dev
• Python version: 3.7

Description

If you don't specify a start date or a period, the NWIS will return the most recent data for your sites. This produces two problems:

• you get a warning that HF can't figure out the period, so period gets set to <0 Minutes>
• It produces a dataframe with lots of different rows, each with a different time. If you request a subset of the dataframe, you still get all of these rows.

What I Did

new = hf.NWIS(stateCd='MD')
new.df()

Potential Solutions

• don't allow NWIS to make 'recent' requests; instead create a 'Search'/'Find_Sites' class or function that returns a dict
• create a condition in the NWIS parameter parsing that identifies when a 'recent' request is being made, and treat it differently from your normal .df() parsing.
• If you allow NWIS to make these requests, then at least have the NWIS.repr string list the most recent observation for each parameter.