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Andreas,

to me this is a no brainer: keep the attribute if it was originally there.

thanks
Pedro

On Thursday 31 March 2011 10:05:38 Andreas Draeger wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> There is currently a discussion going on in the JSBML mailing list that
> requires the opinion of some people from the SBML community.
>
> The question is:
>
> Should we or should we not keep the information constant=true in local
> parameters with SBML Level < 3 when writing an SBML file given that this
> was written in an original file?
>
> >>> One question is, do we want to write back the constant attribute to
> >>> keep the file as it was ?? If yes, we probably need to add a class
> >>> attribute to tell us if the constantAttribute was set and then add it
> >>> in the writeAttribute method.
> >>
> >> It does not really make sense to write "constant=true" in a local
> >> parameter with Level < 3, because by default this is always the case. No
> >> matter what was written in an original file, I would remove this in any
> >> case.
> >
> > There is nothing wrong to put the attribute to true, like this, you are
> > sure that other software that use your SBML file
> > will set the attribute to true even if they do not know the default
> > value that is written in the SBML specs.
> >
> > But also, it is nice to give back the model as it was written by the
> > user or the tool that created it. This is why we are doing that for all
> > the other
> > attributes in all the other classes that have a default value in the
> > specs. If the user set it in the original file, we are writing it back
> > even if it is the default value.
> >
> > Not sure why we should make an exception for the constant attribute in
> > the class parameter.
>
> Cheers
> Andreas

--
Pedro Mendes
Chair in Computational Systems Biology
School of Computer Science
Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology
University of Manchester

Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre
131 Princess Street
Manchester, M1 7DN, U.K.
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