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MDC API
Beyond the possibility of decompressing mdc-compressed files with CLI, it's also possible to access the data from programming language via appropriate API. Before introducing details of specific APIs the general idea is presented. The first thing to do is always open the MDC file via the appropriate module (class in the case of C++, function + struct in the case of C). The handle (object/struct instance) to this file cannot be used directly to perform queries, but instead, it offers a mechanism to obtain another module (query engine) that may be used to query. Multiple query engines may be obtained from a single MDC file handle. To get a query engine, the programmer must provide a list of segment IDs (strings) and a list of atom IDs (ints). Both can be empty (if both are empty, the query engine will select all the atoms from the MDC file). Having query engine programmer may query for a list of frame IDs (resulting frames are in the order of this list). The distinction between a file handler and a query engine is for multithreaded purposes. There should be (usually) a single file handler for a given MDC file, and to perform queries from multiple threads, each thread should have its query engine.