Allow search of ids in ElementIdentifiers

[oruebel]

Motivation

This is to allow us to address oruebel/ndx-icephys-meta#9 When creating references to DynamicTable we often don't know the indices of the rows we need but only the list of ids. With this we can now do:

dst = DynamicTable(.....)
rows_with_ids = dst[ dst.id == [0,10] ]

Checklist

• Have you checked our Contributing document?
• Have you ensured the PR description clearly describes problem and the solution?
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[codecov]

Codecov Report

Merging #187 into dev will increase coverage by 0.04%.
The diff coverage is 100%.

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##              dev     #187      +/-   ##
==========================================
+ Coverage   70.32%   70.36%   +0.04%     
==========================================
  Files          30       30              
  Lines        5911     5916       +5     
  Branches     1381     1382       +1     
==========================================
+ Hits         4157     4163       +6     
+ Misses       1323     1322       -1     
  Partials      431      431

Impacted Files	Coverage Δ
src/hdmf/common/table.py	54.98% <100%> (+0.88%)	⬆️

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[rly]

I think for docval to do its intended behavior, the function has to be defined as def __eq__(self, **kwargs). Given that this function must be def __eq__(self, other) in order to override the == functionality, the docval decorator should be replaced with a docstring. Then it is clear that validation and all the other docval functionality does not run.

[oruebel]

@rly @ajtritt I added in fe6f124 a test to check if docval correctly performs the type checking and it seems to work fine.

[oruebel]

I.e., the test in ed95b58 actually tests this and seems fine too

[rly]

Interesting. So it does work then. Out of curiousity, does the name need to match the name of the variable? Or is it just doing positional arg matching?

[oruebel]

When calling ElementIdentifiers == 1 Python will pass as a positional argument, i.e., the error checking in docval happens for this here

hdmf/src/hdmf/utils.py

Lines 423 to 436 in 8ddae22

	parsed = __parse_args(
	_copy.deepcopy(loc_val),
	args[1:],
	kwargs,
	enforce_type=enforce_type,
	enforce_shape=enforce_shape,
	allow_extra=allow_extra)
	for error_type, ExceptionType in (('type_errors', TypeError),
	('value_errors', ValueError)):
	parse_err = parsed.get(error_type)
	if parse_err:
	msg = ', '.join(parse_err)
	raise_from(ExceptionType(msg), None)

The name of the docval argument and the argument of the __eq__ function need to match, e.g, if I change the docval argname it something you would get TypeError: __eq__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'something'