Crystallography Online: the website of the International Union of Crystallography

One important point -- while, strictly speaking, there should be no harm
in adding additional binary sections anywhere in a CBF, I believe people
have gotten used to finding the image as the first (and in all current
cases as the only) binary section.  So, it might be a good idea to put
such supplemental binary header binary sections after the image, so that
packages that are looking for the image don't get confused.

Personally I would agree with Harry that an ascii translation of binary
header would be easier to work with in checking the format.  That could
appear before the image with the risk of confusion.

Regards,
  Herbert
=====================================================
 Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
   Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
        Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769

                 +1-631-244-3035
                 yaya at dowling.edu
=====================================================

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, harry powell wrote:

> Hi
>
> I don't understand why you'd want to add the binary header, to be
> honest. I can see why you might want to have the contents of the
> header as an ASCII comment section - but I think this should just be
> a check while developing the file format.
>
> Could you elaborate why you'd want it there?
>
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > We here would, in fact, like to add our binary header to the CBF file.
> > Should that just go into an additional binary section, with MIME
> > header
> > and all of that?  If so, is there any recommendation as to how we can
> > refer to it in the CIF headers so that I can distinguish between the
> > binary image data and our binary header data?  My inclination is to
> > add
> > the ".header_convention" column to my "_array_data" loop and fill
> > it in
> > with "RAY_1.0" or something like that for the our binary header and
> > with
> >   an empty value "" for the image data.
> >
> > e.g. :
> >
> > loop_
> > _array_data.array_id
> > _array_data.binary_id
> > _array_data.header_convention
> > _array_data.data
> >   ARRAY1 1 RAY_1.0
> > ;
> > --CIF-BINARY-FORMAT-SECTION--
> > <<MIME header for Rayonix binary header dump>>
> > <<Rayonix binary header dump>>
> > --CIF-BINARY-FORMAT-SECTION----
> > ;
> >   ARRAY2 2
> > ;
> > --CIF-BINARY-FORMAT-SECTION--
> > <<MIME header for image binary data>>
> > <<Image binary data>>
> > --CIF-BINARY-FORMAT-SECTION----
> > ;
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > --
> > Justin Anderson                    Rayonix, LLC (Formerly Mar USA)
> > Software Engineer                  justin at rayonix.com
> > 1880 Oak Ave. Ste. 120             Evanston, IL, USA 60201
> > 877.627.9729                       847.869.1548
> > _______________________________________________
> > imgcif-l mailing list
> > imgcif-l at iucr.org
> > http://scripts.iucr.org/mailman/listinfo/imgcif-l
>
> Harry
> --
> Dr Harry Powell, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, MRC Centre,
> Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 2QH
>
>
>
>
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