Introduction

 

The CIFOBJ class library was developed in order to provide an object view of the mmCIF dictionary. The class library has two components as illustrated in Figure 1. The first component builds a persistent store of objects of type: item, sub-category, category, and dictionary. Each object is a container for all relevant attributes for that object type. CIBOBJ accesses and checks the dictionary contents using methods provided by CIFLIB. The CIFOBJ loader class assembles the dictionary objects and passes these to the object storage manager. The second component of the CIFOBJ class library provides methods for building dictionary objects from the persistent store. CIFOBJ implements methods to access all of the attributes for each object type and returns this information as a string or an array of strings.

• reads and writes mmCIF dictionary objects.
• provides read and store access to individual dictionary attributes.
• provides efficient persistent storage management of dictionary objects.
• provides a stable callable interface in the C++ programming language.

This document describes the public interface to CIFOBJ.

 

Figure 1:  Functional diagram of the CIFOBJ class library.