Commandline

[robdebruin]

To be able to use Iromlab integrated into a workflow it would be neccessary to be able to call Iromlab via commandline. The following would be the minimum functionality required:

• Start Iromlab (with last batch - optional)
• Stop Iromlab
• New batch
• Finalize batch
• Submit Optical carrier (PPN, Volume number, type)
• Version of Iromlab
• Status of Iromlab (running [which PPN/volumenummer], ready, amount of errors, ...)

[bitsgalore]

Don't think I completely understand this; basically this would mean completely bypassing the current UI, why would you want to do that?

Anyway, most of these functionalities (submitting a carrier, finalizing a batch, etc) are things that happen while iromlab is already running, and having a command line interface isn't the solution for this. I think this would require something like a socket API where Iromlab acts a a server that listens to requests from client applications. That might actually be useful for allowing iromlab to communicate with e.g. an external application that manages a list of PPNs.

[robdebruin]

This would make it possible to integrate into workflow. It doesn't matter how that is done, but that it can be done. A socket API would be fine. We already have a workflow that keeps tracks of PPN's. We see that a lot of steps are needed to 'digitize' the disk in Iromlab and maintain the status correctly. A lot of handwork has already been eliminated, but still errors occur.

[bitsgalore]

This might work:

• Create server module that listens for incoming requests, based on app-server.py and libserver.py here
• Launch this as a separate thread
• Communicate this back to iromlab.pyw (using queue interface? something else?)
• Update state of PPN and Volume No widgets accordingly (include automatic updating of Volume No if PPN is identical to previous PPN)
• Make this optional through config file

[bitsgalore]

Socket interface for PPN/title entry now pretty much works: https://github.com/KBNLresearch/iromlab/commit/182340d22aa86f7f8b90e1a73291620be2502117

Might need some further tweaking and refactoring.

TODO: move handleSocketRequests function into carrierEntry class. done!

[bitsgalore]

Socket API seems to work, but while making a simple demo client I ran into this:

https://github.com/KBNLresearch/iromlab-socketclient/issues/1

While this happens the socket API is not of much use.

[bitsgalore]

Also have a look at this:

https://docs.python.org/3/howto/sockets.html

and:

https://medium.com/python-pandemonium/python-socket-communication-e10b39225a4c

which looks simpler than what we have now.

[bitsgalore]

Replace existing socket code by much simpler code adapted from here, and this seems to work:

https://github.com/KBNLresearch/iromlab/commit/b09e76a265245c0af3ae8c7800a7977929db9dd5