search

jimbraun / XCDF

XCDF: eXplicitly Compacted Data Format. See documentation at Read the Docs:
https://xcdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Other
14 stars 8 forks source link

Field Groups #73

Open jimbraun opened 8 years ago

jimbraun commented 8 years ago

In many cases, the data will be such that the user does not want to fill every field for every event. Logically, there would be groups of fields that are filled for any given time. It would make sense to support this concept in XCDF. There would be a default unnamed group, and users could add groups by name. To add fields to those groups, the AddXXXXField methods would take an optional group name field.

This would lay the foundation to supporting more structured data, possibly using an object-oriented storage format built on top of xcdf, while the files themselves remain valid XCDF and are flat, allowing one to use all the generic XCDF tools and analysis support.

jimbraun commented 8 years ago

Field groups, by definition, would need their own data block. The field group interface would read only one group at a time, so it should be natural to avoid reading/decompresssing the data blocks for field groups that are not read. This is a possible implementation for feature #27.