Intellisense issues in VS Code

[guessproject]

🔍 Before submitting the issue

• I have searched among the existing issues
• I am using a Python virtual environment

🐞 Description of the bug

Pylance issues an error when creating new STK objects. For example, the enumeration STKObjectType.SATELLITE is threated like an integer.
Also, some attributes are not accessible by Pylance, e.g. sat.set_propagator_type

📝 Steps to reproduce

scen = root.current_scenario
targetSat = scen.children.new(STKObjectType.SATELLITE, "Target")
targetSat.set_propagator_type(PropagatorType.ASTROGATOR)

💻 Which operating system are you using?

Windows

📀 Which ANSYS version are you using?

2025 R2

🐍 Which Python version are you using?

3.13

📦 Installed packages

pySTK 0.2

[duposyl]

Thanks for the feedback! I was able to reproduce the behavior that you observed.

The first part (the enumeration STKObjectType.SATELLITE is threated like an integer) is something that needs more investigation to see if we can tweak the definition for that enumeration (and potentially other enumerations) to make it work better with pyright.

The second part ("attributes are not accessible by Pylance, e.g. sat.set_propagator_type") is expected and require providing more information as part of the code to work with pyright and static type checkers. We should improve the documentation to describe and explain that behavior.

More details:

Second part

pyright is a static type checker, and it only knows about the type information available statically in the IDE without running the code. Looking at these 2 lines:

chaserSat = scen.children.new(STKObjectType.SATELLITE, "Chaser")
chaserSat.set_propagator_type(PropagatorType.ASTROGATOR)

as a developer, we know that chaserSat is a satellite. But pyright deduces the type of the chaserSat variable based on the return value of the ISTKObjectCollection.new method, which is ISTKObject. Therefore, by default it is only going to suggest methods and properties from that interface:

To help pyright figuring it out the correct type for that object, we need to construct a satellite object explicitly using:

chaserSat = Satellite(scen.children.new(STKObjectType.SATELLITE, "Chaser"))
chaserSat.set_propagator_type(PropagatorType.ASTROGATOR)

pyright now knows that chaserSat is a satellite, and it is able to suggest methods and properties from the Satellite class:

Applying that pattern to the snippet of code that you provided fixes all but one issue:

First part

Back to the first part. From the screenshot above it looks like pyright still cannot figure out the correct type for the STKObjectType.SATELLITE enumeration and threats it like an integer. We need to look into this.

Wrap up

2 follow up actions from this issue:

• Provide documentation about how to help static type checkers by constructing classes with the corresponding type.
• Investigate why STKObjectType.SATELLITE is not recognized.

Thanks for your feedback!

[jorgepiloto]

I'm able to reproduce this too. The reason why pyright or any other LSP narrow this to a Literal[...] is likely because at some point we have a == int or we are passing this to a method accepting an int.

There are ways for preventing type checkers narrowing types, see type narrowing docs. However, the solution proposed in these docs involves the creation of functions, which introduce some overhead.

Maybe, knowing that pure integers are supported, we could just add something like:

def function(object_type: ObjectType | int):
    ...