Documentation/DicomApplicationHosting:DataExchangeDevelopment

DICOM Specifications uncertainties

First the implementation showed some dark areas on how to stick to the official definition. These comments have been (or will be very soon) forwarded to Lawrence Tarbox for advice and correction.

• Some inconsistencies in the naming of parameters and functions (capitalization mostly). But these are benign, they just need polishing on an updated version.
• It is not always clear in the definition that some data are a ArrayOf[Type]. For instance, section 9.2, definition of the AvailableData type lists these parameters:
  • ObjectDescriptors : ObjectDescriptor[] – An array of ObjectDescriptor data structures [...] 
  • Patients : Patient[] – An array of Patient data structures.

Replacing the term ArrayOfPatients by Patient[] leads to confusion as what is an array, and does one need to wrap arrays with this ArrayOf[Type] wording.

• ArrayOf[Type] has been very obscure to us. Especially since we had poor notions of WSDL notations we can't really challenge this notation, and the w3c definition creates a gray area http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl#_wsdl :

Array types should extend the Array type defined in the SOAP v1.1 encoding schema (http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/) (regardless of whether the resulting form actually uses the encoding specified in Section 5 of the SOAP v1.1 document). Use the name ArrayOfXXX for array types (where XXX is the type of the items in the array). The type of the items in the array and the array dimensions are specified by using a default value for the soapenc:arrayType attribute. At the time of this writing, the XSD specification does not have a mechanism for specifying the default value of an attribute which contains a QName value. To overcome this limitation, WSDL introduces the arrayType attribute (from namespace http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/) which has the semantic of providing the default value. If XSD is revised to support this functionality, the revised mechanism SHOULD be used in favor of the arrayType attribute defined by WSDL.

Dirty hacks and unpolished methods

QtSoap limitations

There is no constructor nor accessor for long simple types in QtSoap, only ints are covered. For the sake of quick implementation and early testing ObjectLocator.length and ObjectLocator.offset have been casted to int at Soap->C++ translation time. If someone knows how to transfer Soap long object with QtSoap, please give us a hand.