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Instrument Data Service

What is it?

The Instrument Data Service (IDS) is a Data Service that is specialized to hold all of the instruments that are created during a user session. Whenever an instrument definition is loaded it is saved in the IDS and further workspaces that refer to the same instrument share the same definition.

How does it work?

The Instrument data service is similar to all of the other Data Services in mantid and is implemented as a simple dictionary object holding keys referring to shared pointers to the base instrument definitions. The key is a compound string made up of the Instrument name with a sha1 hash of the text of the instrument definition appended. For those detail minded among you, the has is derived specifically by first converting any lines endings within the definition to linux line endings, and then trimming any white space from the start and end of the definition before calculating the sha1 checksum.

Extracting an instrument from the Instrument Data Service

This is rarely something that a user or an algorithm writer would need to do as it is all handled by the framework internals. Normally you would access the instrument relating to a workspace directly though that workspace.

Example: Getting the instrument from a workspace

ws = CreateSampleWorkspace("Event",NumBanks=1,BankPixelWidth=1)
inst = ws.getInstrument()
print(inst.getSource().getPos())

Output:

[0,0,-10]

Category: Concepts