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The Access Layer (or AL) if the central data access library which allows reading, writing and manipulating IDS data objects, as being defined in the Data Dictionary (DD), through various APIs and programming language.
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access to single time slices of data (IDS)
- API providing access methods (read/write) to an ITER physics Database based on the ITER Physics Data Model
- Provided in Fortran, C++, Matlab, Java, Python
- The only effort for using the Data Model is to map the input/output of your code to the Data Model and add some GET/PUT commands
- The access methods are writing to a local database stored in your account
- These local databases can be shared among users (for reading only) and can be accessed remotely
Access Layer architecture (Bartek)
In order to cope with multiple languages and maintaining at the same time a unique structure definition, the AL architecture defines two layers. The top layer provides the external Application Programming Interface (API), and its code is automatically produced from the XML description of the ITM database structure. For each supported programming language, a high level layer is generated in the target language. The following sections will describe the language specific API, and they provide all the required information for simulation program developers.
The lower layer is implemented in C and provides unstructured data access to the underlying database. It defines an API which is used by all the high level layer implementations. Knowledge of this API (presented in a later section) is not necessary to end users, and is only required to the developers of new language specific high level implementations of the AL as well as the developers of support tools for ITM management.
Application Layer
High Level Interfaces
Low Level
Backends
High Level Interfaces and their API (Application Programming Interface)
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