Private Tag File in dcmdata/libsrc == DCMDICTPATH variable?

[dave]

I have created a private tag dictionary related to proton therapy treatment and have the environment variable DCMDICTPATH pointing to it. However, now I see that the toolkit contains its own private tag file "private.dic" in dcmdata/libsrc. Am I correct in assuming that, since DCMDICTPATH is not pointing it, private.dic is not being loaded? If so, I guess it would be best to combine my file with private.dic.

Thanks.

David

[Marco Eichelberg]

If you have created your own private dictionary, you can load that in addition to the other dictionary file(s) the DCMTK tools load. On Posix platforms, by default, /usr/local/dicom/lib/dicom.dic is loaded and private.dic is not. This behaviour can be modified through the DCMDICTPATH environment variable, which behaves like the PATH variable - it can refer to multiple files separated by colon characters. DCMTK will load all dictionary files in the specified order, e.g.:

Code: Select all

DCMDICTPATH=/usr/local/dicom/lib/dicom.dic:/usr/local/dicom/lib/private.dic:/home/mylogin/myprivate.dic
export DCMDICTPATH

On Windows things are slightly different. By default all tools use a built-in dictionary that corresponds to dicom.dic (i.e. does not include the private tags). This behaviour can also be modified through the DCMDICTPATH environment variable, which, however, uses the semicolon as a separation character as usual on Windows.