Good way to initialize clusters and parse files into them

Question

I'm writing a small application to open some sonar .xtf files and look at their data.  The format is published and I have done a crude job of building a cluster and initializing it...then reading the file header and parsing it into the cluster so I can use the data in the headers to read the data packets that are stored next.  Here is an example of how I have done one of the parsing jobs...very crudely,
Read the header binary in (length defined)
Build the cluster by creating variables from the input file...and then loading the file data in the appropriate cluster variables after casting and ordering the bytes properly...
Surely this is not the best way to do this...perhaps loops controlled by the number of bytes in parameter to be parsed...???
I'm looking for a smart strategy for looking at the definition document, which defines the name of the variable, where the variable appears in the header (byte offset), how many bytes it is made up of....and translating that information into the cluster definition efficiently...
Ideas would be appreciated....
Thanks in advance for your help.
Attached are a couple of examples of parsing part of the header information.
Hummer1
Attachments:
Channel Header Info Parse.vi ‏36 KB
ClusterHeaderInfo.vi ‏46 KB

Answer 1

There may be a way to do this using "Flatten to String" and "Unflatten from String".
One issue is that it looks like your strings are fixed length, while LabVIEW uses variable length strings where the string length is preprended to the string bytes when the data is flattened.   But I think if you yourself insert the bytes 16 and 53 into the string data you read from the file at the appropriate places, you can get LabVIEW to read the data and convert it to your cluster.
Read the data as a string.
Insert the bytes listed above at the correct places.
Pass that through the Unflatten from string to convert that string data to a cluster.  You define the cluster by feeding a constant that defines the datatype into the function.
I think if your binary files as a not too complicated structure, and you define your data types for each element of the cluster precisely, you can get this to work.
Play with the attached snippet.
Attachments:
Channel%20Header%20Info%20Parse[1].png ‏66 KB