Support composite devices in plans

[olliesilvester]

As a user of Blueapi, I would like to run plans which contain composite devices.

In Hyperion, our plans use a lot of devices so we have something like

class FlyScanXRayCentreComposite:
    aperture_scatterguard: ApertureScatterguard = inject(...)
    attenuator: Attenuator = inject(...)
    ...


def flyscan_xray_centre(
    composite: FlyScanXRayCentreComposite,
    ...

BlueAPI doesn't seem to be happy with this kind of thing right now. When doing a blueapi controller plans, the server outputs:
ValueError: Value not declarable with JSON Schema, field: name='aperture_scatterguard' type=ApertureScatterguard required=True

[callumforrester]

FlyScanXrayCentreComposite is a dataclass rather than an ophyd/ophyd-async device, which is why blueapi doesn't like it. It checks whether things being injected as arguments are plans or devices as different behaviour is needed for each.

I guess we have 2 options:

1. Make blueapi consider dataclasses to be a type of "device"
2. Make the composite devices actual devices (probably StandardReadables or just plain ophyd-async Devices)

How would you feel about option 2? I'm not hugely against option 1 but it would be nice to keep blueapi's definition of a device somewhat idomatic for future-proofing purposes.

[olliesilvester]

I can't see any issues with doing 2. I think @DominicOram also mentioned this as a possibility

[DominicOram]

If it's a Device do we have to do the instantiation of the sub devices inside it? I'm not a big fan of that because we'll end up with potentially multiple instances. Alternatively we could get something like https://github.com/DiamondLightSource/hyperion/blob/main/src/hyperion/utils/context.py#L47 in to blueapi?

[callumforrester]

Hmm, I don't think so, if the devices already exist and you pass them in via the constructor, they may get .connect() called on them twice, but it is idempotent and cached to reduce network calls so that's not the end of the world. @coretl or @abbiemery can you see any problems with this approach?

[coretl]

@coretl or @abbiemery can you see any problems with this approach?

The other issue is naming. If you name the parent it will attempt to name the child.

The other option is to do the connect explicitly in a plan as proposed in DiamondLightSource/dodal#415 (comment)

[callumforrester]

From a discussion on Slack we think the idiomatic way to do this in blueapi is:

class MyComposite(BlueapiBaseModel):
    x: Motor = inject("x")
    y: Motor = inject("y")
    det: Eiger = inject("det1")

def my_plan(composite: MyComposite) -> MsgGenerator:
    ...

Unsure if it will do this out of box, if it doesn't, this ticket will become a bug report.

[stan-dot]

@olliesilvester have you tried the implementation suggested above?

[olliesilvester]

No, I haven't tried this yet

[olliesilvester]

I think #647 is a prerequisite to seeing if this would work

[stan-dot]

I see, ok