[Bug]: Auto-generating MultiContainerInterface subclasses

[mavaylon1]

What happened?

First alerted in #948, there is a bug from auto-generating class that inherits from MultiContainerInterface. In this example, PlaneExtension extends PlaneSegmentation, which inherits from MultiContainerInterface (you can see this in the schema with reference_images having quantity *. With extensions, NWBInspector does not see the python class definitions and will autogenerate the class from the schema. In this example, PlaneExtension is auto-generated. PlaneExtension inherits from both MultiContainerInterface and from PlaneSegmentation, which is a DynamicTable.

Within DynamicTable is a pre-init method _gather_columns that uses the base classes in a conditional to create pre-defined columns. When autogenerating a class, the order of these classes are determined in lines 377-385 of classgenerator.py

if issubclass(MultiContainerInterface, bases[0]):
    # if bases[0] is Container or another superclass of MCI, then make sure MCI goes first
    # otherwise, MRO is ambiguous
    bases.insert(0, MultiContainerInterface)
else:
    # bases[0] is not a subclass of MCI and not a superclass of MCI. place that class first
    # before MCI. that class __init__ should call super().__init__ which will call the
    # MCI init
    bases.insert(1, MultiContainerInterface)

Since MultiContainerInterface is not a sub-class of DynamicTable (bases[0]), we insert at index 1.

Within gather_columns, we check

if (len(bases) and 'DynamicTable' in globals() and issubclass(bases[-1], Container)
                and bases[-1].__columns__ is not cls.__columns__):

Such that bases[-1] (the last base in this case would be MultiContainerInterface) is assumed to be a DynamicTable and checks for columns. This returns the error:
AttributeError: type object 'MultiContainerInterface' has no attribute '__columns__'

To fix this, the search for DynamicTable should be agnostic to the order of the bases.

Steps to Reproduce

# Run the extension or un-register a class.

Traceback

No response

Operating System

macOS

Python Executable

Python

Python Version

3.10

Package Versions

No response

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct
• Have you checked the Contributing document?
• Have you ensured this bug was not already reported?

[mavaylon1]

I'll target this before the end of October.

[rly]

@mavaylon1 Could you tackle this issue this week?