RFC: Improve the Decoder.read_file_header

Currently the `Decoder.read_file_header`method in the Python SDK only returns the major version for both the protocol version and profile version.

IMHO this is incorrect, and I would like to suggest adding a new method `Decoder.read_file_header2` (or something similar) that returns both the major and minor version using, as an example, a class like

class Version(object):

major = value

minor = value

Thanks

Manlio Perillo

manlio_perillo over 1 year ago

Another problem with the `Decoder.read_file_header`method is that the local `FileHeader` class cannot be pickled.

Ben FIT over 1 year ago in reply to manlio_perillo

We can add methods to the FileHeader class that return the version values as major.minor. Something like 2.0 and 21.115.

Supporting pickle serialization is not an advertised feature or something that we are guaranteeing. The messages probably serialize with pickle since they are dictionaries containing primitive data types, and maybe a date object. What we can say is that how it works today will not change.

manlio_perillo over 1 year ago in reply to Ben FIT

IMHO, pickle support is very useful for caching, since parsing a FIT file is very slow in Python.

One of my scripts needs to parse many files, and caching is a necessity.

Here is an alternate implementation, using a normal function:

https://gist.github.com/perillo/8bccfc210b0e848532173720868046e5

Ben FIT over 1 year ago in reply to manlio_perillo

We can add a `get_dict` method to the file header class that will return all of the header values in a dictionary. That should be serializable using Pickle. We have a release planned November 21, but we might be able to publish the Python SDK to PyPI earlier. We will let you know.