`PointsModel.parse()` fails with `AttributeError: 'DataFrame' object has no attribute 'attrs'`

[enric-bazz]

PointsModel.parse fails when called with dask 2026.1.1.

Reproduce

This code reproduces the issue when parsing transcripts from a Xenium dataset:

import dask.dataframe as dd
from spatialdata.models import PointsModel
from spatialdata.transformations import Identity

ddf = dd.read_parquet("path_to_xenium_output/transcripts.parquet")

points_parse_kwargs = {
 'coordinates': {'x': 'x_location', 'y': 'y_location', 'z': 'z_location'},
 'transformations': {'global': Identity()},
 'feature_key': 'feature_name',
}

points = PointsModel.parse(ddf, **points_parse_kwargs)

Fails with:

AttributeError: 'DataFrame' object has no attribute 'attrs'

[enric-bazz]

I updated the issue title and description because I initially thought that omitting both feature_key and instance_key arguments was causing the missing .attrs and the error. It turns out the error occurs even when those arguments are provided and I don’t know the exact cause.

To add context, the version in which I encounter the error is 0.7.3a1.dev9+g094b86905, whereas the pip release 0.7.3a0 does not exhibit this problem.

[LucaMarconato]

Hi, can you try importing this manually?

spatialdata/src/spatialdata/__init__.py

Line 139 in 6a3eef7

import spatialdata.models._accessor # noqa: F401

Also, it would be helpful if you could reproduce the issue with the blobs dataset written on a temp dir. Thank you!

[enric-bazz]

Thanks for the reply. Manually importing the _accessor module solves the issue.

With spatialdata 0.7.3a1.dev9+g094b86905, code fails with the same error even earlier on the blobs dataset, at the spatialdata object creation:

from spatialdata.datasets import blobs

sdata = blobs()

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File ".../spatialdata/datasets.py", line 74, in blobs
 ).blobs()
 File ".../spatialdata/datasets.py", line 161, in blobs
 points = self._points_blobs(self.transformations, self.length, self.n_points)
 File ".../spatialdata/datasets.py", line 278, in _points_blobs
 return PointsModel.parse(...)
 File ".../spatialdata/models/models.py", line 765, in _
 return cls._add_metadata_and_validate(...)
 File ".../spatialdata/models/models.py", line 887, in _add_metadata_and_validate
 data.attrs[ATTRS_KEY] = {}
AttributeError: 'DataFrame' object has no attribute 'attrs'