Hi folks - I'm investigating HDF5 as a solution to a problem I've got. I'm working on an application that reads a variety of message types, converts them to a canonical form, and writes out the data (primarily numeric) in various formats. I'm attracted by the idea that HDF would provide a well-supported way of presenting the hierarchies inherent in the data. Complicating the picture is the fact that many of the data types are variable-length and various of the message types have conditional fields. In short, sizes and offsets can be pretty fluid.
I've been looking at the documentation for compound datatype, and to my inexperienced eye it seems like the most natural way to represent a message. I have some questions, though: 1) The message structure I'm dealing with is discovered at runtime, while the example code uses structs that are defined at compile time. Is there a common idiom for specifying compound datatypes dynamically? 2). The documentation indicates that datatype members can't be variable length? Are there common workarounds (e.g. allocating the max that a member might need)? 3) The documentation mentions that members can be small arrays - how small is small? Thanks for your attention. -Josiah
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