Working with Information Object Definitions

An Information Object Definition (IOD) is an abstract data model that specifies information about Real-World objects. It provides a means of standardizing information exchanged between applications. There are a tremendous number of IODs that are standard for the DICOM file format. In addition to the standard IODs, user-defined IODs may also be added.

LEADTOOLS maintains a tree internally of all available Information Object Definitions (IODs), standard and user-defined. In this documentation the tree of available IODs will be referred to as the IOD Structure, since some methods allow you to evaluate the internal IOD Structure as a tree or as a list. Unfortunately, the collection of default IODs is too large to include a table of default values in this documentation. For more information on IOD defaults, refer to the DICOM Standard.

LEADTOOLS provides a number of methods for maneuvering through and modifying the IOD Structure. All methods pertaining to the IOD Structure are in the class DicomIodTable.

For maneuvering through the IOD Structure, LEADTOOLS provides the following methods:

DicomIodTable.GetRoot

DicomIodTable.GetParent

DicomIodTable.GetChild

DicomIodTable.GetFirst

DicomIodTable.GetLast

DicomIodTable.GetPrevious

DicomIodTable.GetNext

LEADTOOLS provides several methods for searching the IOD Structure. To find the IOD for a specific class or Module, use DicomIodTable.FindClass and DicomIodTable.FindModule. You can find the IOD for elements, Modules or classes using DicomIodTable.Find. If you want to find the IOD for the Module at a specific position in a specific class, use DicomIodTable.FindModuleByIndex.

To insert new items in the IOD Structure, call DicomIodTable.Insert.

You can delete individual items from the IOD Structure using DicomIodTable.Delete, or you can delete all items from the IOD Structure, using DicomIodTable.Reset.

To change the name or the description of an IOD already in the IOD Structure, call DicomIodTable.SetName and DicomIodTable.SetDescription.

To determine whether you have a valid IOD object, call DicomIodTable.Exists.

Finally, to reset the IOD Structure to the default values, use DicomIodTable.Default. For more information on IODs, refer to An Overview of the DICOM File Format or the DICOM Standard.