ECHMET Data Import Infrastructure

Introduction

ECHMET Data Import Infrastructure (EDII) is a pluginable framework for import of chromatographic and electrophoretic experimental data from various sources. It is designed to run as a separate background service. Communication with other software is accomplished via IPC interfaces. Pluginable architecture allows for easy addition of support for new data formats. Individual plugins may use Qt5 toolkit to provide GUI interface.

Supported data formats through built-in plugins

EDII is shipped with the following plugins that allow import of the following data formats

• Agilent (HP) ChemStation / OpenLab
• ASC text file (Beckman-Coulter 32Karat, EZChrom)
• Comma separated values (CSV)
• NetCDF (currently tested only with 32Karat output)
• 32Karat, EZChrom native .dat files

Supported IPC interfaces

• Local TCP socket (everywhere)
• D-Bus (Linux)

Dependencies

EDII depends on the following toolkits and libraries in order to be built and run

• Qt 5 toolkit
• CMake

Plugin dependencies

HPCSSupport

• libHPCS

NetCDFSupport

• NetCDF

ASCSupport

• ICU

EZChromSupport

• EZFish

Building

EDII relies on the CMake build system to generate appropriate make or project files.

Build parameters

• -DEDII_PLUGIN_ENABLE_ASC=ON|OFF - Whether to build ASCSupport plugin, defaults to ON
• -DEDII_PLUGIN_ENABLE_CSV=ON|OFF - Whether to build CSVSupport plugin, defaults to ON
• -DEDII_PLUGIN_ENABLE_HPCS=ON|OFF - Whether to build HPCSSupport plugin, defaults to ON
• -DEDII_PLUGIN_ENABLE_NETCDF=ON|OFF - Whether to build NetCDFSupport plugin, defaults to ON
• -DEDII_PLUGIN_ENABLE_EZFISH=ON|OFF - Whether to build EZChromSupport plugin, defaults to ON

Build parameters of built-in plugins

ASCSupport

• -DICU_ROOT= Path to ICU installation, if an ICU installation is not available in system-wide directories

HPCSSupport

• -DLIBHPCS_DIR= Path to libHPCS installation if not available in system-wide directories

NetCDFSupport

• -DLIBNETCDF_DIR= Path to NetCDF installation if not available in system-wide directories

EZChromSipport

• -DLIBEZFISH_DIR= Path to EZFish installation if not available in system-wide directories

Linux/UNIX

cd to the directory with EDII sources and run the following sequence of commands

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make

Windows

Use CMake-gui tool to set up the project and generate project files for your compiler of choice. Keep in mind that since Qt5 exports C++ objects, EDII must be built with the same compiler that was used to build your Qt5 toolkit. Refer to the Linux/UNIX section of this README for details how to set up paths for the required dependencies.

Writing custom plugins

See EDII\include\plugins directory for header files describing the API that an EDII plugin shall expose. Keep in mind that since EDII is a C++/Qt-based project, the plugin must be built by the same compiler and linked against the same libraries as EDII itself.

Licensing

ECHMET Data Import Infrastructure is distributed under the terms of The Lesser GNU General Public License v3 (GNU LGPLv3).

Author

Michal Malý

Group of Electromigration and Chromatographic Methods (http://echmet.natur.cuni.cz)

Department of Physical and Macromolecular Chemistry Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic