Assign auto instead of 0 to mean unused

[joseph-robertson]

Pull Request Description

It's confusing to assign 0 to an argument to mean unused. So we'll:

• still assign 0 if it makes sense as an input (even if unused)
• assign none when 0 doesn't make sense as an input

Related Pull Requests

[related PRs from different repositories]

Related Issues

Closes #1289.
Closes #1293.

Checklist

Required:

• Technical reference documentation has been updated
• Add to the changelog_dev.rst file
• No unexpected regression test changes on CI (comparison artifacts have been checked)

Optional (not all items may apply):

• Tests (and test files) have been updated
• Supporting resource files have been updated (related to resstock-estimation)
  • data dictionary
  • source report
  • options saturation
  • options_lookup
• openstudio tasks.rb update_measures has been run

[shorowit]

"We'll leave 0 when: the argument is required"

That's a big gap that will still result in situations where the input is confusing or misleading. In these cases, couldn't we automatically remap "auto" to a valid value here? Or maybe we should reconsider whether some of the BuildResHPXML arguments should be required.

[joseph-robertson]

"We'll leave 0 when: the argument is required"

That's a big gap that will still result in situations where the input is confusing or misleading. In these cases, couldn't we automatically remap "auto" to a valid value here? Or maybe we should reconsider whether some of the BuildResHPXML arguments should be required.

For example, for options with cooling_system_type=none, we set cooling_system_cooling_efficiency=auto. Then at the place you linked to, we set cooling_system_cooling_efficiency=0 (or perhaps to its default value). Something like that?

I suppose it's up to you whether we want to change, e.g., cooling_system_cooling_efficiency to be an optional argument.

[shorowit]

For example, for options with cooling_system_type=none, we set cooling_system_cooling_efficiency=auto. Then at the place you linked to, we set cooling_system_cooling_efficiency=0 (or perhaps to its default value). Something like that?

Yep, exactly. Maybe it would make sense to use 99999 just to ensure that the value isn't being accidentally used, as that would surely cause something to blow up. I don't know if that's a good idea or not.

I suppose it's up to you whether we want to change, e.g., cooling_system_cooling_efficiency to be an optional argument.

I think I'm okay with doing this. Or at least trying. I'm not sure what the disadvantages are exactly. But it must be confusing to users to have to provide a cooling_system_cooling_efficiency value even when they have no cooling system, for example. And we could probably clean up some code in OS-HPXML (like here) if we did this.

[joseph-robertson]

Superseded by #1316.