issue_comments

I realised that the reason that Travis and AppVeyor weren't running properly was because there were conflicts between this PR and master. I think I've managed to rebase and push properly - but let me know if I've done anything wrong.

Ah ok - that works (not entirely sure why, but it works!)

Oops yes, sorry!

I'm having a bit of an issue with changing the strings to constants (which, by the way, I completely agree is how it should be done). I've defined the constants in backends/api.py and am then trying to import them in core/dataarray.py.

I am doing the import as:

from ..backends import DATAARRAY_NAME, DATAARRAY_VARIABLE

But this gives me the following error:

../../anaconda3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/py/_path/local.py:650: in pyimport __import__(modname) xarray/__init__.py:3: in <module> from .core.extensions import (register_dataarray_accessor, xarray/core/extensions.py:3: in <module> from .dataarray import DataArray xarray/core/dataarray.py:9: in <module> from ..backends import DATAARRAY_NAME, DATAARRAY_VARIABLE xarray/backends/__init__.py:8: in <module> from .netCDF4_ import NetCDF4DataStore xarray/backends/netCDF4_.py:6: in <module> from .. import Variable E ImportError: cannot import name 'Variable'

It seems like my relative import is somehow mucking up another relative import inside the netCDF4 stuff. Do you have any ideas how I can solve this? Am I just doing my imports wrong?

Great, thanks. I think I've done these changes (frustratingly I can't see a way to use *args/*kwargs after using the full argument list in the function definition, so I've had to write it out. Let me know if there is a better way, but I suspect there isn't).

Thanks - I've got that working with the close() method, and I did it 'properly' using the BaseDataObject class.

The only failure on here now is the same as #991 - a conda error creating one of the environments.

Also, it seems like there might be an issue with not closing the Dataset - but only on Windows (see the AppVeyor build failure at https://ci.appveyor.com/project/jhamman/xarray-injyf/build/1.0.268/job/kr8ss684ijxg55be).

Any ideas how this could be sorted without having to implement .close() for DataArray (or, alternatively, how to go about implementing that, given that I don't think a DataArray contains a reference to the Dataset that it may have come from)

Thanks for the useful comments.

I've added some bits to the Sphinx docs in the places that I think they should go - but let me know if I need to add any more.

I think I've dealt with the comments/issues now, but let me know if more needs doing.

Thanks @shoyer - I wasn't actually aware that DataArrays can have a name before they're put into a Dataset (that's one of the things I love about contributing to OSS: you always learn things about the software that you never knew before!). I'll deal with the design issues ASAP.

How would you suggest testing this? I wasn't sure where to put the tests, and what exactly to test? Presumably something about the equivalence between this and saving after manually converting to a dataset, but I wasn't really sure how best to go about it.