Use ProbeGroup object instead of contact_vector property

[alejoe91]

Depends on SpikeInterface/probeinterface#416

[alejoe91]

This is removed because when we split_by and aggregate probes might overlap

[h-mayorquin]

I would like to take a look to this. I can do it this week.

[samuelgarcia]

I guess that @zm711 and @h-mayorquin are now dancing on their seat just reading this PR.

Let me read it slowly.

[h-mayorquin]

As we discussed previously I think this is a step in the direction direction.

Is _build_probegroup_from_properties only for backwwards compatbility?

I think we can segregate the backward-compatibility serialization logic (_build_probegroup_from_properties) from the main class methods by moving it into the deserialization hooks. _extra_metadata_from_dict already runs after properties are set (base.py:1202), so it can check for "probegroup" first and fall back to reconstructing from contact_vector. For the folder path, load_metadata_from_folder (base.py:639) needs to swap lines 643 and 646 so .npy properties load before _extra_metadata_from_folder runs, giving the hook access to legacy contact_vector when there is no probe.json. This has the side effect of a cleaner design where has_probe() becomes return self._probegroup is not None with no mutation at check time.

[alejoe91]

As we discussed previously I think this is a step in the direction direction.

Is _build_probegroup_from_properties only for backwwards compatbility?

I think we can segregate the backward-compatibility serialization logic (_build_probegroup_from_properties) from the main class methods by moving it into the deserialization hooks. _extra_metadata_from_dict already runs after properties are set (base.py:1202), so it can check for "probegroup" first and fall back to reconstructing from contact_vector. For the folder path, load_metadata_from_folder (base.py:639) needs to swap lines 643 and 646 so .npy properties load before _extra_metadata_from_folder runs, giving the hook access to legacy contact_vector when there is no probe.json. This has the side effect of a cleaner design where has_probe() becomes return self._probegroup is not None with no mutation at check time.
_extra_metadata_from_folder

Let's check also how zarr does it. If we don't have a separate function for zarr, we can also add it to __init__