[Insight-developers] IO : itkLoad, and CanReadFile()

[Luis Ibanez]

It sees that there are a couple of
inconsistencies in the way factories
are used in IO. I just checked in the
classes:

  itkMetaImageIOFactory and
  itkMetaImageIO

but run in the following problems:

1) there is a global function itkLoad()
   in itkPNGImageIOFactory, it returns
   a pointer to a PNG IO factory casted
   as a ImageIOFactoryBase.

   Is that function supposed to be a member
   method ?

   How can other IO factories use it ?

2) the method "CanReadFile()" calls
    "ReadHeader()" and depending on the
   status returned by "ReadHeader()" it
   returns a boolean.

   Should we, then, when writing IOs
   avoid to print error messages when
   inconsistencies are found in the headers ?
   and just return false in that case.

   for example , in the test for MetaImage,
   error messages appears comming from VOL
   saying that it is not able to read the
   header.  Should we maybe separate this
   task and have a method that only test
   the file for belonging to the right
   class ?


Thanks


Luis