Implement a generic container datasetType?

[kmdouglass]

I wonder whether it would be useful to implement a sort of "generic" datasetType that can store misc. images and metadata associated with a dataset?

One could imagine attaching blot images for acquisition group, for example.

Would it be sufficient to implement this datasetType as a numeric array (of arbitrary dimensions) and JSON attributes?

[kmdouglass]

This is now being prototyped on the issue39 branch.

One remaining question regards registration of generic types. How should B-Store keep track of what types it should work with and what types it should ignore? Not every experiment is going to contain data of all the possible types.

One idea I have is some form of registration, where B-Store keeps a master list of types and the types register with this list if they are to be used.

[kmdouglass]

Most of the prototype code is now in place, but I don't have any database build tests in place yet.

I could write a drift correction generic type and generate some test data to test this.

[kmdouglass]

The initial HDFDatabase.build() tests seem to work alright. However, the parser doesn't actually know how to read a generic dataset from a file. I will probably have to add another abstract method to the Generic metaclass that tells the parser how to read the file for builds() to work.

This would be a good thing in the end because then a parser doesn't need to know how to read data from disk either: details about a datasetType could be fully contained in the generic type.

[kmdouglass]

This is now on the development branch. It should serve as a good starting point for the refactoring in #44 .