Improve how to move cells between problems and Universes

[MicahGale]

This is related to this discussion: https://hpcgitlab.hpc.inl.gov/experiment_analysis/mcnpy/-/merge_requests/45#note_399815.

Currently to add cells from one cell to another problem you have to:

1. Append the new cells to problem.cells
2. Then run problem.add_cell_children_to_problem to copy over the surfaces, etc.

This method is pretty error prone and can lead to redundant surfaces and conflicts as identical surfaces read in from different files will be different objects. There is some capability to detect this and it's not great. Also this heavily relies on hashing, which is bad (#22).

The ideal use case is that when a user runs problem.cells.append() the cells are added properly and they don't have to think anymore. Similarly universe.append should do a similar thing. problem.universes.append() should also add all children cells to the problem.

[MicahGale]

Thoughts @tjlaboss?

[MicahGale]

In GitLab by @tjlaboss on Sep 20, 2022, 14:41

This sounds like a good idea. How should it handle number conflicts?

• Error
• Renumber, with warning
• Renumber silently
• Let the user choose with an argument to .append()

[MicahGale]

Right now there is some handling of this already. If there is a number conflict with append an error is raised. append_renumber will just renumber the object. https://experiment_analysis.pages.hpc.inl.gov/mcnpy/api/mcnpy.numbered_object_collection.html

I think we could just cast this behavior down to the lower levels of objects.

[MicahGale]

This will be easier after 1.0.0 with a lot of append hooks in NumberedObjectCollections