API for adding classes/properties at runtime

[kasei]

I'd like a way to add classes and properties to cromulent.model at runtime. This would be akin to what would happen if I added rows to crm_vocab.tsv, but with the flexibility to do it conditionally (dependent on the calling code, specific script being run, etc.).

The code in cromulent.model that builds the classes does not seem to be easily extended to incrementally add classes or properties. It is rather tightly coupled with the TSV parsing/loading code, and also seems to depend on ephemeral data that is loaded from the TSV file, but not persisted once the class building process is done. If this code could be decoupled and improved to allow incremental class building, new data could be provided either as an additional TSV file (or equivalent without having to actually touch the filesystem), or in an already-processed form similar to what the process_tsv function produces.

[cbutcosk]

On the property customization side of this, recently I needed to adjust the domain / range or multiplicity of a property without necessarily changing it for all classes. Since props are carried in class instance scope and validation happens at prop assignment we used a runtime patch that reconfigured the prop while we were using the off-book definition:

def unsafe_set_crom_prop(prop: str, entity: Any, value: Any, predicate: str, inverse_property=None, inverse_predicate=None, multiple_okay=True, profile_okay=1):
    entity._all_properties[prop] = model.PropInfo(property=prop, predicate=predicate, range=type(value), inverse_property=inverse_property, inverse_predicate=inverse_predicate, multiple_okay=multiple_okay, profile_okay=profile_okay)
    setattr(entity,prop,value)
    del entity._all_properties[prop]

Not pretty but it was nice to know we could keep things in the runtime since I found reasoning about the TSV table beyond my skills at the time. Might warrant a belt-and-suspenders approach to model customization (ie, both TSV configs and patches)?