Improve errors from `convert` function

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
78/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
python
Domain
api

Research direction

Start in cyprecice/cyprecice.pyx at the convert function, lines 15-24, and reproduce the failure by passing an Enum member where a string is expected. Update the error behavior so it identifies the received type and supported types, then verify the resulting message against the Interface example in the issue.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

The error return by the convert function is not helpful at the moment. I stumbled over this when I organized my participant names in an Enum

class ParticipantNames(Enum):
    MASS_LEFT = "Mass-Left"
    MASS_RIGHT = "Mass-Right"

One has to pass, for example, ParticipantNames.MASS_LEFT.value to the API. But I forgot the .values part, which led to an errors similar to

>>> precice.Interface(1,2,3,4)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "cyprecice/cyprecice.pyx", line 87, in cyprecice.Interface.__cinit__
  File "cyprecice/cyprecice.pyx", line 24, in cyprecice.convert
TypeError: Could not convert.

I think it would be good to tell the user which type was received from the API and which types are supported here. If I would have known that I provided a <enum 'ParticipantNames'> instead of a <class 'str'> this would have helped me a lot debugging.

Dominant language
Cython
Stars
30
Forks
19
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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