[Nexus-developers] Steps towards NAPI-4.0

[Mark Koennecke]

High,

I made a couple of steps towards NAPI-4.0. The newly commited version of 
NAPI supports:
- group attributes
- NX_LOAD_PATH
- external NeXus file linking.
- Three new NAPI functions to implement external linking.
See the attached HTML file for details. The function testExternal in 
napi_test.c is also a nice usage
example. We agreed only on NXinquirefile. However, the feauture that 
NXopengroup and NXclosegroup seamlessly
switch files when necessary had the disadvantage that the napimount 
group attribute which  controls this became hidden.
Thus NXlinkexternal and NXisexternalgroup became necessary  in order to 
control and inquire about linking.

All three new functions are available in the C, F77, Java and swig 
API-s. NXbrowse has been updated to deal with the new feautures.

What still needs to be done is some more testing especially on the 
windows platform. As of now the automatic
testsuite is broken. The tests run successfully but the output has 
changed because I added more tests. Moreover for
the tests to run successfully, it is necessary to make NX_LOAD_PATH 
point to to the directory containing the test programs or to run the 
test programs in that directory. I did not make changes to NXdir; I 
think P^2 is faster on this then me.

While working on this I found yet another build bug: When building the 
Tcl-Swig adapter , the shared library was renamed
to nxtcl.so. When loading this, Tcl complained that it could not find  
Nxtcl_Init .  Rightly so, because the shared libraries
init function was called Nxinter_Init after the file from which the 
interface was generated: nxinter.i. The solution is easy:
- either make the shared library be named libnxinter.so
- or rename nxinter.i to nxtcl.i.

Before committing this I tagged the version on cvs to nexus-3-last such 
that we can go back if the new feautures fail us.

                             Best Regards,

                                               Mark

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