DCMTK

The new DCMTK modules "dcmiod" and "dcmfg" contain numerous classes that are directly related to various tables in DICOM PS 3.3. It might, therefore, be desirable to generate these "low-level" classes automatically from a machine-readable version of the DICOM standard. This approach has already been used quite successfully for the "lower level API" of the dcmrt module (and for the context group classes in "dcmsr/cmr" only recently). Of course, derived classes can provide more sophisticated functionality that cannot be generated automatically (at least not without handling all the special cases, which probably makes no sense).

The advantages of an automatic generation of these classes would be:

• Better coverage of the DICOM standard with (almost) no additional work.
• More consistency between classes of the same type (both code and documentation).
• Less work for maintenance (update the classes each time the standard changes).
• etc.