How difficult is it to convert my application to handle arbitrary netCDF-4 files?
Modifying an application to fully support the new enhanced data model may be relatively easy or arbitrarily difficult :-), depending on what your application does and how it is written. Use of recursion is the easiest way to handle nested groups and nested user-defined types. An object-oriented architecture is also helpful in dealing with user-defined types. We recommend proceeding incrementally, supporting features that are easier to implement first. For example, handling the six new primitive types is relatively straightforward. After that, using recursion to support Groups is not too difficult. Providing support for user-defined types is more of a challenge, especially since they can be nested. Soon we hope to provide at least one generic example, nccopy, to help show how this can be done.
