IOFormat is a library developed and used by Thermofisher Scientific software teams for a variety of formats encoding and decoding.

What is IOFormat for?

IOFormat is based on the IOLink datamodel, and is used as complementary tool to create views from encoded data retrieved from files, streams, network, and more.

Where IOLink allows abstracting data as Image models, IOFormat can import complex data (encoded in any formats) into this environment.

In summary, it opens your application to the outside world.

What is required to use IOFormat?

It is strongly recommended to look into the IOLink user guide to get a quick overview of view and storage concepts, that are broadly used in IOFormat.

Who is this User Guide for?

This user guide is for any developers who:

• Want to use the IOLink data model into their own software application and enjoy the multiple formats handled by IOFormat.
• Already use the IOLink data model for in-memory images manipulation, but want to import/export data from/to outside world.

It explains some IOFormat few basic concepts, gives an overview of the available features, and suggests code snippets to ease its use.

User guide organization

Document is composed of following sections:

• Overview: You will find a quick overview of IOLink concepts. Quick to read, it should give you an idea of the goals of IOLink.
• Configuration: To know the IOLink and IOPlugin versions compatible with IOFormat.
• Functionalities: You will find the list of supported formats, and the available functionalities, and the ones that are already planned.
• Installation: If you decide to try IOLink/IOFormat, this chapter is for you, and you should be able to quickly integrate IOFormat in your project.
• Fundamentals: This chapter will always be in progress to be enriched with new features. If you have any question about "how to do something", this should be very helpful.
• Plugins: To have details about each plugin provided in the IOFormat package.