Errors in Loading the “Template Writing” BuildingMOTIF Tutorial

[wehuang16]

Basically what I did was, with the “template writing” tutorial (https://nrel.github.io/BuildingMOTIF/tutorials/template_writing.html), I copied the following codes to a Jupyter notebook file named “template_writing_tutorial.ipynb”:

from rdflib import Namespace, Graph
from buildingmotif import BuildingMOTIF
from buildingmotif.dataclasses import Model, Library
lib = Library.load(directory="my-templates")
templ = lib.get_template_by_name("vav-terminal-reheat")

I also copied the following codes to a “.yaml” file named “vav-terminal-reheat.yaml”, where the file “vav-terminal-reheat.yaml” is inside a folder named “my-templates”:

The setup of the aforementioned Jupyter Notebook file and the “my-templates” folder (containing the “.yaml” file) was shown here (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mcN42q8JbkM-3Rwx2jNqdGPRvYg9GgUs?usp=share_link). The Jupyter Notebook file and the “my-templates” folder were stored in the “BuildingMOTIF/docs/tutorials” file path.

I first ran the “template_writing_tutorial.ipynb” file, but it returned the following error at the line
lib = Library.load(directory="my-templates") :

Then I added the line bm = BuildingMOTIF("sqlite://"), so that the file “template_writing_tutorial.ipynb” now looks like the following:

from rdflib import Namespace, Graph
from buildingmotif import BuildingMOTIF
from buildingmotif.dataclasses import Model, Library
bm = BuildingMOTIF("sqlite://")
lib = Library.load(directory="my-templates")
templ = lib.get_template_by_name("vav-terminal-reheat")

I ran “template_writing_tutorial.ipynb” again. It returned the following error at the line
templ = lib.get_template_by_name("vav-terminal-reheat") :

Therefore, I would like to raise this issue here to learn more about how we could resolve the above errors.

[haneslinger]

hello @wehuang16! Thank you for the ticket. I've got two small fixes that'll get this running.

Given the imports and building motif inti

from buildingmotif import BuildingMOTIF
from buildingmotif.dataclasses import Library

bm = BuildingMOTIF("sqlite://")

the lines

lib = Library.load(directory="./my-templates")
templ = lib.get_template_by_name("vav-terminal-reheat")

results in

WARNING: Warning: could not resolve dependency dep<name=https://brickschema.org/schema/Brick#Supply_Air_Flow_Sensor bindings={'name': 'sa-flow'} library=https://brickschema.org/schema/1.3/Brick id=None>
...
sqlalchemy.exc.NoResultFound: No row was found when one was required

This is because vav-terminal-reheat is dependent on the brick schema, which is not present. If we add it,

brick = Library.load(ontology_graph="./libraries/brick/Brick-subset.ttl")
lib = Library.load(directory="./my-templates")
templ = lib.get_template_by_name("vav-terminal-reheat")

We get the error

ValueError: In vav-terminal-reheat the values of the bindings to https://brickschema.org/schema/Brick#Occupancy_Sensor must correspond to the parameters in the dependant template.Dependency https://brickschema.org/schema/Brick#Occupancy_Sensor refers to params {'occ'} that do not appear in template vav-terminal-reheat

This is because vav-terminal-reheat details two dependencies it does not use, occ and co2. If we remove these two dependencies, or add them to vav-terminal-reheat's body the code will pass.

[wehuang16]

Thank you so much for your information!

[gtfierro]

It looks like this error arose because the sanity checking logic on templates does not take into account optional arguments. Actually, it is exactly because of the reason @haneslinger identified -- the parameters are not used in the body. I'll update this in the docs.

This should be a straightforward fix on my end. Sorry you ran into this!