dcmdump and dcmodify for pynetdicom?

[richard-moss]

Hi guys,

I frequently use dcmtk's dcmdump and dcmodify. ...I've been thinking of instead building them on top of pydicom/pynetdicom.

...any thoughts on adding those to either of the existing libraries? ...create a new 'tools' library instead? (pytoolsdicom?). This could form the basis of a port of the complete dcmtk toolset to py.

[scaramallion]

It'd make more sense to make a new package pydicom-tools or something if you want to include networking capabilities, although recently @darcymason has added some CLI utilities to pydicom. Pure dataset manipulation tools might be a better fit there?

[moloney]

I just released a python package for doing "higher level" stuff on top of the excellent pydicom/pynetdicom, including providing a nice CLI: https://github.com/moloney/dcm

It does have some dumping / editing capabilities already. Plus a nicer CLI for doing DICOM networking. It is still pretty alpha but works well for the tasks I use it for.

[darcymason]

It'd make more sense to make a new package pydicom-tools or something if you want to include networking capabilities, although recently @darcymason has added some CLI utilities to pydicom. Pure dataset manipulation tools might be a better fit there?

@moloney's project looks interesting, but if you wanted to go your own way, you could either add to pydicom's CLI within the pydicom repo through a PR, or you can use a separate repo and add your own sub-command's to the pydicom command, or completely roll your own.

I'm a little reluctant to take large CLI contributions into pydicom itself due to the large workload and increased complexity we already have, keeping everything working when changing/adding features. That's why I set up a framework for hooking into a pydicom CLI. Enhancements to that CLI framework in pydicom would be welcome, however - e.g. abilities like dcmodify's 'tag-paths` could be useful to all CLI authors.

Perhaps a separate pydicom-tools or pydicom-cli within the pydicom organization could be set up, but would probably need a champion to maintain it. Even better if it was its own repo for a while until it was gaining some traction and had a good contributions record.