Get list of stations dynamically

[kratzert]

Instead of relying on the csv files with station id and coordinates

[thiagovmdon]

Instead of relying on the csv files with station id and coordinates

Freddy @kratzert, for the countries I'm adding I'm trying to make sure we also can get the stations metadata of all available stations (Spain, Italians, perhaps Ireland?). I will make sure to reference here whenever this is the case!

[kratzert]

Great, that is much appreciated. Solving #1 is the next thing I look into after solving #19. I want to get unit tests first and setup CI tests, so that I can make sure that none of the changes and refactors I am working on is breaking anything

[kratzert]

Currently, even if the fetcher allow downloading metadata (which includes the list of gauge ids, see e.g. the UKNRFAFetcher in #38 ), we still use a cached sites file. Should we keep that (i.e. having a cached list of gauges) or always make a request to the data provider to crawl the current list?

Not sure what my opinion is here. I see some advantage of having a cached file but allow the user overwriting it, but we could also say we always dynamically check which stations are available and then only cache them within the object instance for as long as the object exists.

Thoughts? @thiagovmdon @simonmoulds

[thiagovmdon]

Currently, even if the fetcher allow downloading metadata (which includes the list of gauge ids, see e.g. the UKNRFAFetcher in #38 ), we still use a cached sites file. Should we keep that (i.e. having a cached list of gauges) or always make a request to the data provider to crawl the current list?

Not sure what my opinion is here. I see some advantage of having a cached file but allow the user overwriting it, but we could also say we always dynamically check which stations are available and then only cache them within the object instance for as long as the object exists.

Thoughts? @thiagovmdon @simonmoulds

@kratzert, I think that the best would be to allow the user to retrieve the list of stations (and metadata) automatically using a function, and art the same time, to keep the cached list automatically (ideally) updated:

1. It seems that not always this is possible. For Portugal, for example, it seems more complicated than it should be.
2. I think that we can keep a cached file ourselves to avoid such situations. The option you said (having cached and allowing overwrite (or let us call let the user check by themselves)) seems right!