Recommendations and Rules for User-Contributed Components¶

First, thank you for considering contributing a component! The following are some rules and recommendations.

Rules¶

super is called in the __init__ method
All public attributes are properties
A component uses all required inputs fields and creates all required output fields.
Components have complete metadata in _info.
The component’s __init__ method takes a Landlab model grid as the first argument.
The component has a main method that takes either dt or nothing. The name is descriptive but does not need to be standardized.
- Solution is that using setters and getters or making a grid scalar.
- Some common name patterns include update(), run_one_step(), or calculate_name_of_thing().
A component raises a ValueError if unused keyword arguments are provided.
A component raises a ValueError if a grid type the component does not support is passed.
Component fields use consistent definition and dimensions (not necessarily units).

A component has a run_one_step method as its main method.
Arguments and keyword arguments start with lower case letters.
Keyword arguments have reasonable default values (and the grid is the only argument to __init__.
Can return or not return information. Some recommendations, Nothing, grid, or a … or a calculated value.
If possible, we recommend that components are unit agnostic.