component.show() not working in IPython about gdsfactory

[sebastian-goeldi]

@doddgray seems reasonable to me. I am totally on board with doing this at least from the quick read through I did. I think in general it might also be better in the ipython (and probably shell) case to use a temp file. My motivation behind the build folder was so that there is traceability (and we don't need to care too much about tempfiles as they can be nasty if we or python clean up too fast). As it will allow you to go back and inspect the gds in case something went wrong or you accidentally close a gds which takes some time to build, etc.

Feel free to open the PR on kfactory. I am the main maintainer over there and @joamatab is the one that finds most of the bugs ^^

[joamatab]

What version of klayout are you using?

You need to update klayout to a somewhat recent version

[fp-matt]

I am currently using KLayout v0.29.0

[joamatab]

What version on klive?

[sebastian-goeldi]

@joamatab you only overwrote Component.show right, or only gf.show?

I think one might go to KFactory directly and therefore write a oasis (default behavior for kfactory on show).

[fp-matt]

@joamatab I have klive v0.3.2

[doddgray]

I also ran into this issue after upgrading to v8 and needed to find a quick fix.

To do this I added a special case in kfactory.kcell to recognize calls from IPython kernels in the handling of name and used tempfile paths for the OAS files in that scenario. It seems to fix the issue, at least interactive sessions can stream GDS data to KLayout again. Maybe not the right way to do this in the long run.

In a local branch I modified the code here:
https://github.com/gdsfactory/kfactory/blob/2e8612db42b7da756ff84eafd6ab9a667d695de8/src/kfactory/kcell.py#L7577
to look like

    # Find the file that calls stack
    try:
        stk = inspect.getouterframes(inspect.currentframe())
        frame = stk[2]
        frame_filename_stem = Path(frame.filename).stem
        if frame_filename_stem.startswith("<ipython-input"):    # Case 1: IPython Kernel call
            ipython_shell_id = frame_filename_stem.rstrip(">").split("-")[-1]
            name = f"ipython-{ipython_shell_id}"
        else:                                                                              #  Case 2: Not IPython Kernel call
            if frame.function != "<module>":
                name = frame_filename_stem + "_" + frame.function
            else:
                name = frame_filename_stem

and the code here:
https://github.com/gdsfactory/kfactory/blob/2e8612db42b7da756ff84eafd6ab9a667d695de8/src/kfactory/kcell.py#L7659C1-L7661C63
to look like:

                if wtd is not None:
                    if name.startswith("ipython-"):
                        root = Path(tempfile.gettempdir()) / "gdsfactory"
                    else:
                        root = Path(wtd) / "build/gds"
                    root.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
                    tf = root / Path(name).with_suffix(".oas")

I'm happy to create a pull request, but not sure if this is how the maintainers want to approach this.