[Insight-users] ImageIO & GUI Support : TCON 2.0 : Topic for Tomorrow : Request for Feedback

[Niels Dekker]

At our research group (LKEB), we're also developing an Image IO 
framework.  Although this framework is more specific to our inhouse 
software development (as it supports LKEB-specific file formats and data 
structures), we've encountered similar design issues.  Both ITK's and 
VTK's IO frameworks are a source of inspiration to our Image IO 
framework.  :-)  It would be very helpful to us at LKEB to be able to 
query the file extensions and the file format description from ITK IO. 
VTK already has this, which made it much easier for us to write a 
wrapper for VTK readers, for our (LKEB) framework.

I think it's a good idea to have the extensions and description of a 
file format aggregated together.  Do you mean to have them as an 
std::pair<string,vector<string>>?  At LKEB, we chose to have them 
together in an AbstractFileFormat class, offering two member functions:

  std::string GetDescriptiveName() const;
  std::vector<FileName> GetFileExtensions() const;

Each file format we support has its own class, derived from 
AbstractFileFormat.

Why do you have separate functions for supported read and write formats? 
Doesn't an IO class typically supports the same file format for reading 
and writing?  Or could one specific IO class possibly support reading 
only JPEG and writing only TIFF files?

I'm also very interested in the Unicode and localisation issues raised 
by Sean McBride at the Insight Developers mailing list.

Kind regards, Niels

Luis Ibanez wrote:
> We would like to get feedback from users
> regarding the following topic:
>
> When using ITK in GUI applications, it is desirable
> to have a mechanism for figuring out what file formats
> are supported for reading and writing, so that they
> can be offered explicitly to the user in the titles
> of the Open and Save file dialogs.
>
> For this purpose, we recently added to the ImageIO
> classes the following three methods:
>
>  * ArrayOfExtensionsType GetSupportedWriteExtensions() const
>  * ArrayOfExtensionsType GetSupportedReadExtensions() const
>  * void AddSupportedWriteExtension( const char * extension )
>  * void AddSupportedReadExtension( const char * extension )
>
> Unfortunately this API is not sufficient, because it doesn't
> provides a textual description of the supported file formats
> and a generic name for the family of file formats.
>
> Additionally, these new API has not been fully implemented
> in all the instances of the ImageIO classes.
>
>
> We are therefore proposing to do one the following:
>
> *  Proposal 1
>   o Change the GetSupportedWriteExtensions()
>     and GetSupportedReadExtensions() to return
>     an array of pairs (extension, description)
>   o Add a method to return a generic description of
>     the ImageIO (e.g. NIFTI, Analyze, MetaImage)
>
>
> * Proposal 2
>   o Change the GetSupportedWriteExtensions()
>     and GetSupportedReadExtensions() to return
>     an array of triplets (extension, description,
>     generic description)
>
> We plan to discuss these two options during tomorrow's
> TCon, as described in the Agenda:
> http://www.itk.org/Wiki/Agenda%26Status_090508
>
> For instructions on how to join the ITK Tcon 2.0,
> please look at:
> http://www.itk.org/Wiki/ITK_in_Second_Life

--
Niels Dekker
http://www.xs4all.nl/~nd/dekkerware
Scientific programmer at LKEB, Leiden University Medical Center