RecordDef

The term 'record,' suggests a structure containing a representation of all of the necessary components of a transaction. The Record in NITRO stores the meta-data contained in the NITF. When the NITRO Reader object loads a file, it places meta-data in the Record. Likeweise, when we take our in-memory structures and transfer them back to file, using our writer, the representation we choose is the NITF Record. Here are the key components of a Record:

• File Header Representation
• Image Section Containing Multiple Segments
• Graphics Section Containing Multiple Segments
• Text Section Containing Multiple Segments
• Data Extension Segments
• Reserved Extension Segments

You can think of the NITF record as a hierarchical view of the NITF file. The children correspond to actual sections of the file. Where it makes sense, data fields found in headers are stored in fields of objects. For example, the file version, once read from the file, is stored in the FileHeader component of that name. When data is variable, such as in TREs, it may be recovered from the HashTable of a TRE object, which can be recovered from each segment's Extension segment.