issue_comments

Couple of minor comments, then we can merge.

@headtr1ck GitHub is unhelpfully not showing me any comments. Can you share a screen shot or something so I can address them? Thanks!

add list_backends under Advanced API

Turns out it was already available so I added it to the Advance API docs as well as https://docs.xarray.dev/en/stable/internals/how-to-add-new-backend.html.

@dcherian I'll bookmark adding it to https://tutorial.xarray.dev/advanced/backends/backends.html.

@Illviljan, in case you didn't see this prior discussion:

So what would the return type need to be to get a nice table representation, but also allow you to select out individual backend objects? A pandas object containing the backend objects? Some kind of BackendList class?

... I haven't dreamed up an answer to this question yet. We could set it up so that __str__ instead returns a pandas series, but I don't see another way we can have a pretty __str__ that will also directly feed into a nicely formated table for avail_engines().

Do you have any suggestions?

Note: avail_engines() has been renamed to show_engines()

we also probably don't want to pollute xarray's public namespace with multiple functions that do basically the same thing. Though maybe as it's all behind the backends namespace that doesn't matter so much? Then we might have list_backends and display_backends or something?

Currently there is this method: ```

xr.backends.plugins.list_engines() {'scipy': <xarray.backends.scipy_.ScipyBackendEntrypoint object at 0x101ec4ee0>, 'rasterio': <rioxarray.xarray_plugin.RasterioBackend object at 0x10217de70>, 'store': <xarray.backends.store.StoreBackendEntrypoint object at 0x10217de10>} and here we're adding (essentially to more effectively and prettily surface the above results to the user): xr.backends.api.avail_engines() Engine Description Documentation scipy
rasterio
store `` The goal that led us (@snowman2 @dcherian @scottyhq) to create the initial issue was giving the user an easy, obvious way to find out what engines were actually available to them in their current environment. In the process of figuring out how to do this, @snowman2 and I discovered thatlist_engines()already existed, we just needed to add the attributes we wanted to display, make it pretty, and put it somewhere a user might look for it. We can certainly change the name ofavail_engines()todisplay_backends(). Is there then a dev need to have another version oflist_backends(), or would a "see also" tolist_engines()` be a solution here?

That would not display in a nice table though. But might be anyway nice to add ;)

Agreed. I added a __str__ to the BackendEntrypoint class, but...

So what would the return type need to be to get a nice table representation, but also allow you to select out individual backend objects? A pandas object containing the backend objects? Some kind of BackendList class?

... I haven't dreamed up an answer to this question yet. We could set it up so that __str__ instead returns a pandas series, but I don't see another way we can have a pretty __str__ that will also directly feed into a nicely formated table for avail_engines().

I know that it is more work but I think it would be more beneficial to have this information formated nicely than simply returning some lists.

Sounds good - I'll make that happen!