DEFAULT.DESCRIPTION

[vlap]

It would be nice to be able to access the description of the experiment, created by autosubmit expid -H HPCname -d Description. Right now the other two variables (DEFAULT.EXPID and DEFAULT.HPCARCH) are available, but not the description DEFAULT.DESCRIPTION

It is not a critical issue but more of a "quality of life" issue. The context of my request is that in auto-ecearth4 there is a diagnostic workflow which creates some plots and then uploads them to the portal by creating an issue, e.g. https://dev.ec-earth.org/issues/1390 . This issue needs a description and I create it manually. It would be nice to put %DEFAULT.DESCRIPTION% there instead

- base.context:
    scratch: %CURRENT_ROOTDIR%
    experiment:
      id: %DEFAULT.EXPID%
      description: %DEFAULT.DESCRIPTION%

@dbeltrankyl @kinow @mandresm

[vlap]

To clarify, there is no need to be able to modify it at runtime. There is an autosubmit command to modify it and that's perfectly fine. Just to be able to read it and use it in yml configs of an experiment.

[kinow]

Thanks for the issue, @vlap . IMHO, it'd make more sense if we kept this in the DB, then just wrote to the metadata/experiment_data.yml, and made it available in commands like autosubmit describe, autosubmit report, and in the workflow templates with %DEFAULT.DESCRIPTION%.

Right now, you can get YAML files that contain EXPID and VERSION and other AS info that is written by AS in files (also created by AS) in the user's conf folder, which may overwrite user files/settings, and can be out of date (e.g. user autosubmit updatedescr, then the experiment will have another value in DB, but I don't think the YAML file will be updated until autosubmit create or run is executed again...).

(nothing to worry about @vlap , I'm just writing something here for internal/dev discussion)

[vlap]

Thanks for engaging so quickly. As you can guess, I am ambivalent about all those considerations about the database and conf files. My use case is very simple. And that's to be able to access (read) the description when running an experiment with autosubmit run. So, I will be happy whichever way you decide to implement it