Developer guide

The developer dialog

The plugin includes a secundary dialog with the icon img/icon_dev.png; that works entagled to the main simulator dialog.
This dialog reads Cell2Fire’s argument parser directly and exposes all of them in a tree view, enabling the following:

  • Easy selection and modification of all simulator parameters (by selecting its checkbox and modifying its value) overriding the normal dialog options.
  • A load and save button to persist the working configuration in the project’s home folder by a pickle.dump file.
  • A text display showing how the selected command line argument looks according to the user selection
  • A checkbox enabling auto copying the selected command into the clipboard (note this is not enabled by default because has a noticeable visual refresh performance detriment)
  • A folder selection widget to change which Cell2Fire simulator will be used
  • A way of overriding the normal Run command that creates a Instance folder with a copy of all data; this can be achieved by specifying the input and output folder, and then instead of pressing Run, press the [dev] button (nexto to kill and terminate ,on the Run tab of the normal dialog)

Main routes of experimenting

  • pyqgis: Open the python console, use the provided extras/qgis_sandbox.py to test commands
  • IPythonQgis : Install the IPython Console plugin (pip install qtconsole is required)
  • qgis plugin: The easiest way to get up to speed with developing QGIS plugins is using the ‘Plugin Builder’ plugin and build a template.
  • cell2fire: Run the included examples, visit https://github.com/fire2a

Clone instead of installing

The plugin and the simulator are developed in different repos so cloning both repos with one as a submodule is suggested

# 0. QGIS >=3.1 LTR installed (opened once else the following directory won't exist)

# 1. 
cd ~/.local/share/QGIS/QGIS3/profiles/default/python/plugins

# 2. 
git clone git@github.com:fdobad/fire2am-qgis-plugin.git fire2am
or 
git clone git@github.com:fdobad/fire2am-kitral.git fire2am

# 3. (optional) submodule
cd fire2am
rm -r C2FSB
git submodule init
git submodule add git@github.com:fire2a/C2FSB.git C2FSB
cd C2FSB
git pull
cd ..

# 4. (Optional) virtual environment : Remember to activate it every time
python3 -m venv --system-site-packages ~/pyenv/pyqgis
echo 'alias pyqgis="source ~/pyenv/pyqgis/bin/activate"'>>~/.bashrc
echo 'alias qgis="source ~/pyenv/pyqgis/bin/activate && qgis"'>>~/.bashrc
bash
pyqgis

# 5.
pip install --upgrade pip wheel setuptools
pip install -r requirements.txt

# 6. Compile
cd C2FSB/Cell2FireC
sudo apt install g++ libboost-all-dev libeigen3-dev
make
 
# If it fails check where your distribution installs eigen. Because the `makefile` assumes `EIGENDIR = /usr/include/eigen3/`  
# Locate it with `nice find / -readable -type d -name eigen3 2>/dev/null`  
# Then edit `makefile` accordingly & try again.

1. Object Naming Convention

To coordinate C2FSB/Cell2Fire/ParseInputs.py, QtDesigner and the plugin code (start at fire2am.py), the following standard must be followed:

Mostly when adding components in QtDesigner their object name is assigned classType_n, so you must change its objectName to prefixName_destName.

1.1 Prefix simplified component type:

prefixName <class type>
layerComboBox QgsMapLayerComboBox
fileWidget QgsFileWidget
radioButton QRadioButton
spinBox QSpingBox
doubleSpinBox QDoubleSpingBox

1.2 Suffix, destName is the same used in ParseInputs.py by the argparse object:

suffixName <argparse.item.dest>
ROS_CV ROS_CV
1.3 The results is that the ui values can be easily retrieved. For example for double spinBoxes (example: doubleSpinBox_ROS_CV): 
    args.update( { o.objectName()[ o.objectName().index('_')+1: ]: o.value() 
        for o in self.dlg.findChildren( (QDoubleSpinBox, QSpinBox), 
                                    options= Qt.FindChildrenRecursively)})

1.4 RadioButton Groups share the same startin suffix name, then camel Uppercase distinctions:

radioButton_weatherFile, 
radioButton_weatherFolder, 
radioButton_weatherRandom, 
radioButton_weatherConst

radioButton_ignitionRandom, 
radioButton_ignitionPoints, 
radioButton_ignitionProbMap

2. adding new resources

compile resources if new icons added 

sudo apt install pyqt5-dev-tools
cd img
pyrcc5 -o resources.py resources.qrc

Qt Designer bug when adding a resource

If the plugin won’t start after adding a resource with No module named 'resources_rc'. Delete the line in between

 <resources>
  <include location="resources.qrc"/>
 </resources>

Ref: broken plugin

3. Cell2fire python developer tips

  • use print(‘…’, flush=True) for rasing the message to the gui
  • never use import *
  • prefer np.loadtxt over pd.read_csv

4. References

Required