File formats

Some components of python-icat read input files or write output files:

The icatdump command line script fetches content from an ICAT server and writes it to a file. The icatingest command line script reads those files and restores the content in an ICAT server. The ICAT data file format written and read by these scripts respectively corresponds directly to the ICAT schema. It is rather generic and may encode any ICAT content.

The metadata ingest file format is basically a restricted version of the ICAT data file format. It is read by class icat.ingest.IngestReader for the purpose of ingesting metadata created by experiments into ICAT.

See the following sections for a detailed description of these file formats:

• ICAT data files
• Metadata ingest files