[Kst] [Bug 85676] Wish for 0.99/1.0: allow datasources to have configuration dialog/settings

[Nicolas.Brisset at eurocopter.com]

On Tuesday 19 October 2004 08:07, George Staikos wrote:
> Already started, almost there.  I just need to sort out a layouting issue.
Once it is possible to configure the datasources, you may want to merge some 
code I wrote for a in-house ASCII format which uses fixed columns into the 
general ASCII datasource. It is pretty trivial but if it can save you a 
couple of hours or even minutes, that's so much more for the other 
bugs/features :-)

I adapted the base ASCII source, but to make it as fast as possible in the 
case of fixed width columns (pretty common I suppose) I use 2 things:
- fixed column width (13 characters in my case, will have to be configurable) 
allows to compute the offset from the beginning of a record/line and atof() 
whole blocks
- there are no comments beyond the header lines (4 lines in my case), so that 
we can directly call atof() and do not need to parse the whole file character 
by character.

I attach the codes (see.h and see.cpp) since I'll be on vacation next week and 
that may be when you want to look at it.

The configuration options I'd suggest for the ASCII datasource are (George, 
make sure your mechanism allows this :-)):
- number of header lines to skip
- line number in which to look for variable names
- (optional) "units in separate line" checkbox and line number for units if 
they should be used
- "non-standard separator" checkbox and lineedit for either a regexp or a 
character to use as field separator (either complete file or only header ?), 
by default, use one or more spaces, tab, or ;
- whether the format is fixed width and if so, spinbox for the corresponding 
number of characters
- whether to expect embedded comments past the header (which means different 
parsing), and possibly a list of comment characters (#, //, ...) - I suppose 
it is enough to detect lines beginning with these characters and that should 
be treated as comments, but I fear there are people out there with files 
containing non-numbers in some columns, which could mean trouble...
Of course, it should be possible to save these options. The best would be to 
be able to store sets of options with a name and associated file extension 
that we can recall later, but I think this can be seen as optional for 
now :-)

It looks like some work, but I think it is really worth it having a great 
ASCII datasource as most people will have ASCII files or can easily create 
them, though with some specificities... and none of my colleagues would 
really like to have only numbers as variable names !
Note that I you had probably guessed I am willing to help with that datasource 
(albeit from Nov. 4th, which may be too late for 1.0 ?).

Nicolas




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