Re: 20050922:DODS/THREDDS confusion

[John Caron <caron@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi David:

This looks great, a few comments aboyut what i did in the netcdf-java library which reads opendap:

David Wojtowicz wrote:
> OK,
>
> Here's what I have come up with concerning the discussion in this 
> thread.   Thanks for considering these potential changes.  A pointer to 
> the patch is at the end of this message.
>
> ***** Summary of Modified Functionality:
>
> 1) All containerized attributes are now "flattened" into the flat 
> namespace.  A colon seperates the container name from the contained 
> attribute name.  Since all container attributes are removed by this 
> process, the netCDF API no longer chokes from encountering one, and the 
> former contents of the containers are now available to access in flat 
> namespace if the user cares to do so.

I did the same in netcdf-java library, but it uses a "." instead of a ":" to seperate the container name(s)

> 2) Because containerized attributes containing strings, are not quoted, 
> the code that removes the quotes is modified to ignore the case where 
> there is no quotes.
>
> 3) In the case of arrays of strings, the array is translated to an array 
> of characters of  the next higher rank, with the extra dimension's size 
> and name being determine as follows:
>
> a) If DODS:strlen attribute exists  (or varname:DODS:strlen in the case 
> of translated structures)  it supplies the size and DODS:dimName 
> supplies the name
>
> or
>
> b) otherwise, the STRING_ARRAY_SIZE constant is used as the size and 
> varname-chars is used as the dim name.
>
> The extra dimension  is added to the global dimension list (if not 
> already existing).   If the name already exists for some reason, but 
> with a different size, an alternate name is used.
>
> 4) Single scalar strings are treated in a similar manner.

I believe I prefetch all scalar Strings, and determine their correct length, then cache the data values.