Reinstantiating workflows for every change

[Tara-Lakshmipathy]

In the current implementation, the workflow is reinstantiated every time there is a change in the GUI. The associated code snippet can be found in reactflow.py:

def get_workflow(self):
        workflow_label = self.wf.label

        wf = Workflow(workflow_label)
        dict_nodes = json.loads(self.gui.nodes)
        for dict_node in dict_nodes:
            node = dict_to_node(dict_node)
            wf.add_child(node)
            # wf.add_child(node(label=node.label))

        nodes = wf._children
        dict_edges = json.loads(self.gui.edges)
        for dict_edge in dict_edges:
            dict_to_edge(dict_edge, nodes)

        return wf

Besides caching becoming non-functional, wf.save also does not work. This is probably due to the reinstantiation trying to add children with the same label to an already saved workflow. The GUI itself simply becomes unresponsive at this point.

While the reinstantiation is a clean way of capturing changes from the GUI side of things, I think it is leading to too many loses in functionality. It would perhaps be better to break down the get_workflow function so that changes are handled without reinstantiating the workflow.

Thoughts @pyiron/gui? (just testing out the teams functionality here, please ignore if you don't want to contribute to the issue)

[Tara-Lakshmipathy]

For now, I found a workaround for saving and loading by adding a suffix to the workflow label:

if ... :
     ......
     ......

elif global_command == 'load':
     if self.accordion_widget is not None:
          self.accordion_widget.selected_index = 1
     temp_label = self.wf.label
     self.wf.label = temp_label + "-save"
     try:
          self.wf.load()
          self.wf.label = temp_label
          self.update()
          print("Successfully loaded from " + temp_label + "-save")
     except:
          self.wf.label = temp_label
          self.update()
          print("Save file " + temp_label + "-save" + " not found!")

elif global_command == 'save':
     if self.accordion_widget is not None:
          self.accordion_widget.selected_index = 1
     temp_label = self.wf.label
     self.wf.label = temp_label + "-save"
     self.wf.save()
     self.wf.label = temp_label
     print("Successfully saved in " + temp_label + "-save")