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ux.open_dataset() should crash when grid and data are not aligned #1853
Description
Version
v2026.10.0
How did you install UXarray?
Source
What happened?
Calling ux.open_dataset(grid_indicator, data_indicator) silently succeeds when the data in data_indicator is not aligned with the grid in grid_indicator, e.g. if the data and grid have different shapes. The indicators could be file paths or they could be xarray Datasets.
What did you expect to happen?
I expected ux.open_dataset to crash (probably with a GridsMismatchError?) when the data is not aligned with the grid.
Can you provide a MCVE to repoduce the bug?
import uxarray as ux
gridfile = ux.tutorial.file_path("quad-hexagon", "grid")
datafile = ux.tutorial.file_path("outCSne30-vortex", "data")
ds = ux.open_dataset(gridfile, datafile)
# expected crash; got UxDataset with ds.sizes == {'ncol': 5400},
# ds.uxgrid.sizes == {'n_max_face_nodes': 6, 'n_node': 16, 'n_face': 4}
Activity
Sevans711 commentedon Nov 9, 2026
A fix to this issue should also consider the case of opening a UxDataset with arrays on different grids:
This currently raises an xr.AlignmentError, but it would probably be more instructive to raise a ux.GridsMismatchError instead.
Additionally, leaning on xarray here without comparing grids directly fails to account for the case of same-sized grids with different contents. The following silently succeeds, but it should almost certainly crash with a ux.GridsMismatchError instead.
Similarly, this also silently succeeds but it should almost certainly fail with ux.GridsMismatchError instead: