Re: Additions to FormNode(?)

• To: Dave Glowacki <dglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: Re: Additions to FormNode(?)
• From: Steve Emmerson <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 12:41:50 -0700

Dave,

>Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 12:09:29 -0600 
>From: Dave Glowacki <dglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>To: visad-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: Additions to FormNode(?) 

In the above message, you wrote:

> It'd sure be nice to push the logic from guessFormFromName() into the
> individual Form classes and augment that with code which recognizes
> the file type based on the first block.  For example, FITS files always
> start with "SIMPLE  = ", GIF files always start with "GIF87a" or "GIF89a",
> etc.

When I designed the FormNode class I also thought about using naming
conventions.  I decided not to put such a capability into the FormNode
class because I thought that a naming-convention capability was somewhat
orthogonal to the capabilities of the FormNode (or at least
complementary).  Thus, I figured that such a capability would be better
off in a class in the user interface that made use of Repositories and
added naming convention capabilities.

One thing I think would be crucial to this capability would be the
ability for the user to customize or modify the naming convention
(sort of like "mailcap(5)").  This would allow different users to have
different naming conventions.  This would entail considerable more
effort than implementing FormNodes that lacked this capability, so I
decided to postpone it.

--------
Steve Emmerson   <http://www.unidata.ucar.edu>

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