DataIO

The DataIO is a utility that provides functionality to control writing measurement results (in csv format) other output to files and reading data back from such output files. It handles the formatting of output and input by parsing several data types.

Interface:

The DataIO functionality is cleanly exposed by static methods contained in a single class called DataIO. Those functions are:

• writeData(openFile, data, Data_Name=''):

  This single function, given an open file object, can write data in that file (in csv) from different data types: It can support single values, suck as strings or numbers as well as multi-dimensional lists consisted of those types. The function will flatten those lists to correctly output the measurement data in csv format.

• get_test_names(path):

  This function, given a path to an measuremnt results’ file will parse it and retrieve the test names of the measurements included.

• get_test_data(path, test_name):

  This function will parse an retrieve the data of a specified test given the path to the file that it is output on.

• parameter_prep(Stages, Maitre, arg_string,func_parameter_list):

  This function should be used to interpret strings as inputs for funtion calls either of devices or the Maitre. The function returns a list with the interpreted paramters. If the input string mentions the Stages-Dictionary or Maitre the funtion will replace them with the object reference. The func_paramter_list should be the expected paramters from the called function. If Stages and Maitre appear in this list they dont need to be specified in the arg_string. The function uses: str(elem).isdigit() to detect whether strings should be casted to floats. Lists can be inserted using this syntax: [1,2.0,3,5] . In lists no spaces or strings are allowed.

Below we see an example of DataIO functions used:

def _procedure(self, entry, file):
      '''executes experiments that use multiple tools or generalized algorythms'''
      args = self._prepArguments(entry)

      # Execute the function using maitre
      data = self.maitre.execute_func_name(entry['procedure'],entry['function'],args)

      # Write the results of the experiment to file
      DataIO.writeData(file, data, Data_Name=entry['measurement'])

As we see, the I/O code can become as small as a one-liner, making the code more readable, as the user does not need to take care of formatting or other pains of I/O.