Dear NetCDF-Group,
we have been working on NetCDF external link functionality. This allows
NetCDF applications to create dimension variables which values are
stored in an external file. Therefore, it uses the HDF5 virtual dataset
(VDS) functionality. This is useful for, e.g., climate applications that
rely on a variable per file and timestep configuration. The idea is to
store the grid in a separate file and link our data to this grid. We
already have our first working version. You find the patch and the
examples on our page:
http://wr.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/research/projects/bullio/netcdf_external_links/start
Under the hood it uses HDF5 virtual datasets. VDS has the advantage of
being compatible to the functions that are supported by oridinary
datasets. Therefore, files containing VDS should be supported by the
most software.
There is a minor issue related to HDF5, the call H5F_try_close function
fails, when ncdump trys to read data from an external dimension. So far
we found a workaround, but we will fix this issue.
It would be great if external link functionality could be supported by
netCDF at some timepoint. We would like to improve our patch and for
that reason we need your feedback. If you have some idea to the issue
above, we would be grateful for each hint.
Regards,
Eugen
