[Gdal-dev] Re: RFC 10

[Frank Warmerdam]

Andrey Kiselev wrote:
> 2. Introduce new mandatory method for format drivers to determine the
> file format. Now GUI scenario will look like that:
> 
>  - select the file name;
>  - determine a format of that file;
>  - let the user choose open options, specific for that format;
>  - now proceed to GDALOpen(), capable to get options as per RFC 10.

Andrey,

Note that RFC 11: Fast Format Identify, already provides a mechanism
to identify the format of a GDAL dataset.  Presumably you are suggesting
something similar for OGR?

> Frank also suggested to pass encoded open options along with file name
> instead of having the separate parameter in Open() method. With this
> approach we will have different names to pass for format identification
> function and for GDALOpen(): pure file name for the former one and
> name+options for the last one. This will only work when we know the file
> format before opening the file, otherwise we just don't know what
> options are needed.

Note that the approach of encoding driver specific options into the
name is already widely used for OGR - mainly for the various RDBMS
drivers.

I'm not clear on why RFC 10 couldn't be altered to provide a standard
mechanism to encode parameters into the datasource name and go from there.
The issue of applications which don't know the format apriori is not new.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org