Export writeElement and readElement

[kristianvalind]

I'm working on a port of the grailbio/go-netdicom package to use your maintained and more idiomatic implementation instead of grailbio/go-dicom. To be able to encode and decode DIMSE messages, I need to use per-element writing and reading. Rather than reimplementing this functionality myself, I propose exporting the readElement and writeElement functions so that go-netdicom or other packages that require low-level DICOM functionality may benefit.

[suyashkumar]

Thanks @kristianvalind! Question for you--would it not be possible to use the Parser.Next() pattern to do element-by-element reading?

Would a similar Writer API help on the writing side?

Just curious--any more context on how you're approaching this would be helpful!

On my side, I don't think this is a huge deal, but also, I'm careful to export more ways to read an element because I'd like there to be one (or maybe two) canonical exported ways to do something (like read or write) in this library.

[kristianvalind]

DIMSE messages consist of a specific set of DICOM elements, and the functionality I need is single element reading and writing from an already open Reader/Writer, so Parser.Next() seems like a good fit on the reading side. I had just not thought about it. Thanks! For writing, a Writer type with a similar API would probably be a cleaner solution than just exporting writeElement.

What would be the best way to implement such an API? I think it would be relatively easy to create a new Writer struct type with methods calling existing non-exported writing functions, but that would not follow the pattern of the Parser type, and might not be the most elegant way...

[kristianvalind]

I'm closing this pull request and will submit another with a Writer struct implementation proposal.

[estergoldberg]

Hi @kristianvalind - do you have a netdicom project that use @suyashkumar's go-dicom package?
Did you really implement code for dicom query that using latest go-dicom package?
I need to implement 'Modality worklist' and also want to use netdicom and go-dicom packages
Thanks in advanced.

[kristianvalind]

@estergoldberg Unfortunately, no.

I started a port of grailbio/go-netdicom to use @suyashkumar's go-dicom, but I haven't touched it in almost 2 years. If you want to have a look, some incomplete feature branches are available.

My goal was something that would be useful for MW, but I ended up calling findscu from dcmtk via os/exec instead.

[estergoldberg]

Thanks anyway, will take a look on your branches.