Resolving groups of plotting parameters general_settings and process_settings

[mafrahm]

At the moment the resolving of groups for plotting parameters general_settings [1] and process_settings [2] only works, when giving a single group, e.g. --process-settings my_group resolves the group, but --process-settings my_group:other_process,some_setting=True does not resolve the group, but interprets my_group as another process.

It would be nice, if we could make the resolve_config_default_and_groups function [3] also usable for the SettingsParameter and MultiSettingsParameter.

[1]

columnflow/columnflow/tasks/framework/plotting.py

Lines 80 to 87 in 5939cb0

	# when general_settings are a key to a general_settings_groups, use them instead
	groups = config_inst.x("general_settings_groups", {})
	if settings and list(settings.keys())[0] in groups.keys():
	settings = groups[list(settings.keys())[0]]
	if isinstance(settings, tuple):
	settings = cls.general_settings.parse(settings)
	params["general_settings"] = settings

[2]

columnflow/columnflow/tasks/framework/plotting.py

Lines 322 to 329 in 5939cb0

	# when process_settings are a key to a process_settings_groups, use them instead
	groups = config_inst.x("process_settings_groups", {})
	if settings and cls.process_settings.serialize(settings) in groups.keys():
	settings = groups[cls.process_settings.serialize(settings)]
	if isinstance(settings, tuple):
	settings = cls.process_settings.parse(settings)
	params["process_settings"] = settings

[3]

columnflow/columnflow/tasks/framework/base.py

Line 419 in 5939cb0

def resolve_config_default_and_groups(

[riga]

I think we could follow to paths here:

1. If there is a single value that could be interpreted as a group, check if it's a group and load its contents if it is indeed a group. But as you already mentioned, this could lead to ambiguities in parameters where a single value, say x, is interpreted as x=True.
2. We use a "reference-like" syntax to mark a value explicitly as a group. I'm thinking of something similar as the config referencing in law or yaml, i.e. "my_value: &other_value". This would look like --process-settings "&my_group:other_process,some_setting=True".

Thinking about the implications of both paths, I'd definitely vote for 2 as it's far more explicit. However, it does require values to be quoted on the command line, but I think that's a fair trade-off.

Including @dsavoiu here as well.

[mafrahm]

I feel like there could be three things to resolve:

1. resolving full groups of settings, where each group is a dict of processes and their corresponding settings (e.g. --process-settings proc1,some_setting=True:some_setting_group:another_setting_group). This should be the only case where we only pass a single value before adding the next :, since passing a process without settings is useless
2. resolving groups of processes (e.g. --process-settings top,some_setting=True should be resolved to --process-settings st,some_setting=True:tt,some_setting=True)
3. resolving settings separately from processes (e.g. --process-settings proc1,some_setting_group). This is probably the most difficult thing to resolve, since this will be parsed as {"proc1": {"some_setting_group": True}}. But I think it is not really necessary to consider this type of resolving because we usually want to use different settings per process anyway. So I'd propose to try to find a solution for only resolving the cases mentioned in 1. and 2.