[Gate-users] Proposal of GjsMessenger

[Hannes Hofmann]

Hello,

I am currently working on an extension of the jobsplitter gjs to support
multiple phantom and source volumes in time-slicing (4D), e.g. for use
with NCAT.

Obviously gjs needs to know some additional things, e.g. when to use the
next volume. Using command line parameters for this information is a bad
idea to me, because it clutters the command line and makes it longer than
it should.

Therefore I added some commands to the macro file (e.g. "/gjs/4D/enable").
During parsing by the macfile parser of gjs they get removed and do not
appear in the final job macfiles. So far everything is fine and should be
working nicely.

But the original macfile can not be run in Gate, because it contains new
unknown commands.

Therefore I propose a new command namespace in macfiles. All commands
starting with /gjs/... (or /gate/gjs/...) should be directed to a new
GjsMessenger (or GateGjsMessenger ) that accepts and simply ignores them.
The original macfile could then be run with Gate without being processed
by gjs.

Do you think this extension could be useful?

Maybe I find the time to implement this messenger, but I don't want to
make promisses.


There are still some open questions:

- Is it possible to create a messenger that accepts wildcard commands? I
would not like to have to update the messenger whenever I add a new
command. Instead the messenger should accept all commands that start with
/gjs/

- Currently a placeholder (%) is used in the filename of the interfile
header to indicate the position of the increasing frame index. This is
another reason why the original macfile would not work before processed by
gjs. But this could be solved by use of a naming convention, e.g. the
frame index is the last thing before the extension and the original
macfile contains the name of the first (1) frame.

Kind regards,
Hannes