This definitely applies to the viz plot scripts. Right now the error will propagate to the SQL command and you get an unhelpful sqlite error. We should catch this earlier and give a clear warning to the user that tells what argument is missing where.

Sort of related, but I also wonder whether we should replace parse_known_args with parse_args to avoid argument typos going through unnoticed.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12818146/python-argparse-ignore-unrecognised-arguments

This discussion has some good suggestions on how to do this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24180527/argparse-required-arguments-listed-under-optional-arguments

Sort of related, but I also wonder whether we should replace parse_known_args with parse_args to avoid argument typos going through unnoticed.

I considered that, but it's a bit of an issue with run_start_to_end, as the scripts it calls don't share the arguments. We could get around that by passing individual arguments -- not the whole object -- to the series of scripts from run_start_to_end. Full circle back to our discussion from yesterday.

I've been running into some of this again with the plots.

A few thoughts:

1. Regarding parse_args vs. parse_known_args: I agree the sub-scripts (run_scenario, process_results, ...) being called in run_end_to_end.py need to use parse_known_args, but everywhere else (run_end_to_end.py, ...) we should be able to use parse_args instead of parse_known_args.
2. I think we should use the parent parser construct to set up a parser once for common arguments such as database, scenario_id, scenario and scenario_location (rather than repeating all that code in every sub-script). The viz suite has an example of how this is done.
3. We can make argument requirements/types/etc. a little more explicit when setting up the ArgumentParser objects by also specifying the type, choices (if applicable), a 'required', and more for each argument. Note that the documentation does not recommend using "--" type keywords for required arguments since the "--" flag is generally assumed to denote optional arguments.
4. Related to (3), I think we should add the default for scenario_location explicitly when setting up the parser, rather than assigning it in gridpath.common_functions.determine_scenario_directory
5. We should handle the case of non-existing scenarios or scenario_ids better (right now it propagates to the SQL statement in auxiliary.auxiliary.get_scenario_id_and_name(), where you query the scenario table but don't get any matches so the fetchone()[0] statement doesn't work.

One easy improvement would be to update get_scenario_id_and_name in auxiliary.auxiliary to throw a meaningful error when there is no match on the scenario name or ID. Right now it tries to fetch the results (which are "None") using .fetchone()[0] and you get the following unhelpful error message:
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable

A simple if query results == None raise IOError("Scenario name not found in database") or something similar would be helpful

Consolidated in #6. When we address this, we can re-open it and have the PR that address it close it.