H5Part development and discussion

[Mark Howison <MHowison AT lbl.gov>]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 4:23 AM, Achim Gsell <achim.gsell AT psi.ch> wrote:
>> One potential issue is that users may have H5hut files that don't
>> conform to some predetermined convention (e.g. the attribute "foo" is
>> always a float32), and they need to query the attribute to determine
>> its type:
>>
>> H5PartGetStepAttribInfo(...)
>>
>> then have a switch to read the attribute:
>>
>> switch(type):
>> case H5PART_FLOAT32 ... H5PartReadStepAttribFloat32
>> etc.
>>
>> which is more complicated than if there were a many-type read function:
>>
>> H5PartReadStepAttrib( ... type ... )
>
> It's not that simple. The user has to determine the size of the type and 
> allocate an appropriate amount of memory.

Well we could alloc the memory in the read function, although it would
be up to the user to free it later.