Should we support parameter value enumeration

[spine-o-bot]

In GitLab by @DillonJ on Sep 4, 2018, 09:49

Hi folks,

Proposal

While considering the implementation of archetypes I came upon the possible need for parameters that will define, for example, model options or methods for doing something. So, they can typically take a number of predefined values. E.g. we might have boolean parameters or something like efficiency_method which might be "linear", "affine" or "piecewise" for example.

Implementation options:

• We could create a new JSON field in parameter definition which can include all allowed values (my preferred option - seems easiest?)
• We could create a new table which contains allowed values for each parameter

Question: Do we depend on the string value of something - in my example above, do we have in the code: if(mip_method(arch_id)=="affine" ... or do we assign an integer value to each option (like an enum in C)? Surely this would be easy to do with a JSON field.

A step further would be to convert the string values to constants that we can use in Julia using JumpALLOut... so we could write (for example) if(mip_method(arch_id)==affine ...

What do you think @manuelma
Also mentioning @juha_k and @poncelet as not everyone looks at the data issues :-)