tutorial for types.hdmf_common classes

[cechava]

Need a tutorial that covers construction and usage for built-in methods that covers the following

• [x] VectorData
• [x] Vector Index
• [x] ElementIdentifier
• [x] DynamicTable
• [x] DynamicTableRegion

[bendichter]

Similar to https://hdmf.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorials/plot_dynamictable_tutorial.html#sphx-glr-tutorials-plot-dynamictable-tutorial-py

[cechava]

working on a section of the tutorial to show how to create expandable tables. similar to: [https://hdmf.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorials/plot_dynamictable_howto.html#creating-an-expandable-table]

Doing this by using a DataPipe object with an infinite dimension for the data field in the VectorData object. The issue is that DataPipe objects only take numeric data. Does anyone have any ideas for a work-around/more general method. This doesn't seem to be an issue for the H5DataIO object in python HDMF.

[bendichter]

good question, @cechava . @ln-vidrio , would it be possible to generalize DataPipe for text?

[bendichter]

@cechava is this is holding you back, let's finalize the tutorial without expandable tables and add it in later

[cechava]

I have left this section of the tutorial to cover only numerical cases, for now

[lawrence-mbf]

@bendichter DataPipe does not support text types (see types.untyped.datapipe.Configuration constant SUPPORTED_DATATYPES).

[bendichter]

@ln-vidrio thanks for pointing me to that. This is limiting for us because we use the DataPipe object to specify max_shape, which is necessary for creating datasets that can grow, e.g. when we want to create a table that can add additional rows later, after the data has been saved in HDF5 and loaded again