API Metadata

API Metadata is extracted using internal tools at NI. This produces several files which are then uploaded to this Git repository. Since these files are generated, they should not be manually changed, as any edits will be lost next time new versions of the files are uploaded. The files contain simple Python dictionaries and their contents are hopefully self-explanatory.

• src//metadata/functions.py
• src//metadata/enums.py
• src//metadata/attributes.py

In addition, the following files are also sourced in the Git repository, but are hand-coded by the nimi-python developers.

• src//metadata/config.py: General driver information.
• src//metadata/init.py: Makes it simple for the nimi-python code generator to load the metadata.
• src//metadata/attributes_addon.py: Additions / overrides applied on top of attribute metadata (as loaded from attributes.py)
• src//metadata/functions_addon.py: Additions / overrides applied on top of function metadata (as loaded from attributes.py)

These "add on" files are important because the Python API is "richer" in a sense than the source of the extracted metadata (the C API). In Python, memory management is done for the client. In Python, we want to leverage enums. This is the sort of thing we need to include in this Pythons-specific metadata.