How to keep track of filenames for field source?

Hi Sadie, Hi David, 🙂

In unifhy we have been using cf.Field.get_filenames for a while to track down the source files of the user input fields so that they can be stored in a configuration file for potential later reuse. And I have only recently being faced with the scenario where "If all of the data are in memory then an empty set is returned", meaning that get_filenames does not return the information we are looking for anymore (unifhy-org/unifhy#80).

So, I am wondering:

  • is there another attribute/property/method of cf.Field that always keeps the filenames of a field regardless of whether its data fits in memory?
  • if not, would it make sense for cf-python to provide such functionality? e.g. not to drop the filenames even if the data fits in memory (I am guessing it wouldn't, otherwise you would already have implemented it 🙂)

Thank you in advance for your help,
Thibault