Custom Drivers

Drivers are the second ingredient necessary to read (custom) datasets. Where as URIResolver s (discussed previously) determines _what_ to read, drivers determine _how_ to read and slice it. For example, you might use the same ConventionResolver to determine which files to read, but different drivers to read .nc, .zarr or .tiff files. Vice versa you might also use the same driver but different resolvers to read data depending on how it was organised. It should therefore be noted that to read a particular dataset it might be necessary to implement a custom resolver as well as a custom driver.

Implementing a Drivers

To function drivers MUST at least implement the following function:

def read(
    self,
    uris: List[str],
    ...
) -> Any:
    ...

You may optionally also implement the following function as is appropriate:

def write(
    self,
    path: StrPath,
    data: Any,
    ...
):
    ...

As can be seen, read takes all of the URIs that the resolver has produced and will attempt to read data from them in whatever way is appropriate. Since the contents of the files themselves might also have to be sliced it is advisable to take the same arguments as the resolver is able to take. Note that the signature of the functions may vary between data types.