Potential to support STRUCTs?

[nsulmol]

It turns out that the 'recommended' way I should be interfacing with Igor (for my specific purposes) would involve me calling functions that take STRUCT references as input. Because of this, I thought it would be worth investigating the difficulty of doing such a thing.

From looking at the Igor XOP documentation and the ZeroMQ-XOP, I have not been able to come up with a way to do this generically. From what I understand, STRUCTs are local to (and have the lifetime of) the function in which they were declared, so there are no universal STRUCTs. (XOP Manual 8, page 109). Additionally, there is no generic way to go from a structure name in string format to an instance of the actual structure in C: you would need to manually maintain a dictionary/map, where you define all mappings from STRUCT string to STRUCT for your specific application.

I figured I would post this here in case someone else has thought about supporting STRUCTs 'generically', and had ideas on how it could be done that I've missed.

Thanks,
nsulmol

[t-b]

@nsulmol Can you post an example function in Igor accepting structs which you want to call?

[nsulmol]

I don't know if I'm allowed to share the code of the function itself, as it is developed by the company who sells us the associated hardware.

However the function takes as input a WMSetVariableAction reference STRUCT. This STRUCT has been created via the SetVariable operation, linked to a particular UI element.

So the STRUCT of interest is not application-specific, if that is your question.

Would that answer the question?

[t-b]

Yes that answers my question. While it might be technically possible to support structs via the zeromq XOP, for this particular case I'd suggest something different. It looks like you want to emulate interacting with a GUI element right?

I'd suggest to take a look at PGC_SetAndActivateControl, see https://github.com/AllenInstitute/MIES/blob/16bd5a55ef467f1b9b9e144a8f3595a4685ead2d/Packages/MIES/MIES_ProgrammaticGUIControl.ipf#L160C10-L160C35. This function allows to interact with a GUI element and for igor it looks like a user did the action.

There are also wrapper functions PGC_SetAndActivateControlVar and PGC_SetAndActivateControlStr for the zeromq XOP (you can't pass optional parameters with the zeromq XOP).

Does that go in the right direction?

[nsulmol]

I think this would work, yes. And yes, my purpose is to automate things I could do via UI.

Do you think it makes sense to try and pull these controls into zeromq-xop? I could look into the functions, test on my end, and prepare a pull request if so.

[t-b]

Do you think it makes sense to try and pull these controls into zeromq-xop? I could look into the functions, test on my end, and prepare a pull request if so.

I don't think these functions should be in the ZeroMQ-XOP repo. A lot of the utils functions from MIES could go in their own repo, but as IP is missing a package manager, this would complicate things a lot for consumers, so I'm hesitant to do that step.

Sorry for the late reply btw.

[nsulmol]

@t-b No worries on the late reply, or the decision not to integrate it. I worked around the issue already (I simply wrote my own IGOR function to avoid dealing with STRUCTs), but thank you for the help.