Developpers workspace

There is no further requirements than the ones of Installing gdcm and gdcmPython. But the developpers generally have further needs than the library user like :

• in place debugging (in place as opposed to fully installed, i.e. when working in the cvs hierarchy or in the hierarchy build from gdcm source tar ball).
• tests of features
• test suite usage (typically after code modifications and prior to commit).

In the following we shall assume that gdcm is already compiled- BUT not installed- in a directory named GDCM_HOME.

Working with C++

The kernel library uses the environnement variable GDCM_DICT_PATH as a path to the location of the default Dicom dictionary. Hence if you which to work/debug a code based on gdcm, you first need to positionate this variable. When omitting this you should get the following message: gdcmDict::gdcmDict: can't open dictionary /usr/local/share/gdcm/dicomV3.dic

Suppose you want to launch some C++ demo/test program, that gets compiled with the kernel, e.g. PrintHeader. One can do

• cd GDCM_HOME
• export GDCM_DICT_PATH=`pwd`/Dicts
• cd Test
• ./PrintHeader

Working with Python

• cd GDCM_HOME
• ./autogen.sh --enable-python
• make
• export PYTHONPATH=`pwd`
• cd gdcmPython
• ln -s .libs/pygdcm.so _gdcm.so (this is because automake doesn't allow the building of libraries whose name starts with an underscore. Since we need the wrapper library to be named _gdcm [because swig automaticatily uses this name when building the shadow classes], automake generates pygdcm.so and at install stage stage renames it to _gdcm.so).
• You can then use gdcmPython for manual test/demos
  1. cd GDCM_HOME/gdcmPython/demo
  2. python PrintHeader.py
• You can also run the gdcm test suite, which is written in Python:
  1. first you need to install the Dicom data files used by the test suite. The cvs access point is :pserver:anonymous@cvs.creatis.insa-lyon.fr:2402/cvs/public and the name of the module is gdcmData. Checkout this module in GDCM_HOME directory
  2. cd GDCM_HOME/gdcmPython/
  3. python testSuite.py

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