Correct use of TIFFGetField with FieldInfo

[Roger Leigh]

Hi,

Looking at the documentation, TIFFGetField appears to require
calling TIFFFieldReadCount and TIFFFieldPassCount to determine
which parameters need to be passed in the argument list.

However, taking TIFFTAG_BITSPERSAMPLE as an example, this
has TIFFFieldReadCount == -1 (TIFF_VARIABLE) and
TIFFFieldPassCount == 0. All the examples I've looked at in the
source tree use a uint16 pointer directly to retrieve the value,
but I'm not sure how this squares with a TIFF_VARIABLE read count.
Why isn't the count 1? (I'm aware libtiff doesn't match the spec
exactly for this tag, but why does it appear to be different from
the implementated behaviour--is it possible to use this safely?)

Is it possible to safely call TIFF(Get|Set)Field using only
the information available in FieldInfo, or are there any cases
where this isn't correct and calling requires a priori
knowledge of how the interface behaves?


Many thanks,
Roger

[Roger Leigh]

Post by Roger Leigh
Hi,
Looking at the documentation, TIFFGetField appears to require
calling TIFFFieldReadCount and TIFFFieldPassCount to determine
which parameters need to be passed in the argument list.
However, taking TIFFTAG_BITSPERSAMPLE as an example, this
has TIFFFieldReadCount == -1 (TIFF_VARIABLE) and
TIFFFieldPassCount == 0. All the examples I've looked at in the
source tree use a uint16 pointer directly to retrieve the value,
but I'm not sure how this squares with a TIFF_VARIABLE read count.
Why isn't the count 1? (I'm aware libtiff doesn't match the spec
exactly for this tag, but why does it appear to be different from
the implementated behaviour--is it possible to use this safely?)
Is it possible to safely call TIFF(Get|Set)Field using only
the information available in FieldInfo, or are there any cases
where this isn't correct and calling requires a priori
knowledge of how the interface behaves?

I'm still running into additional examples of this. For example:

TIFFTAG_COMPRESSION
readcount documented+specified to be 1
dirinfo is: -1/TIFF_VARIABLE
getfield is: 1
TIFFTAG_DATATYPE
readcount documented to be 1
dirinfo is: -2/TIFF_SPP
getfield is: 1
TIFFTAG_(MIN|MAX)SAMPLEVALUE
read/writecount documented to be 1
dirinfo is TIFF_SPP/TIFF_VARIABLE resp.
get/setfield is 1
TIFFTAG_SAMPLEFORMAT
read/writecount documented to be 1
dirinfo is: TIFF_VARIABLE
get/setfield are: 1

By documented, I mean what's in the manpages, which doesn't necessarily match
the TIFF spec. The default FieldInfo seems to mostly follow the spec, but
when libtiff doesn't support e.g. multiple values for TIFF_SPP, it seems
to leave the FieldInfo using TIFF_SPP/TIFF_VARIABLE while the actual
interface for Get/SetField is using single values. Could anyone please
confirm what the intended logic and usage are here? I'd like to be able to
call TIFF[V]Get/SetField safely based upon the content of the FieldInfo for
the tag in use, but this doesn't appear to be possible due to these
discrepancies, which are leading me to hardcode behaviour. But this seems
very fragile: if the libtiff internal behaviour changes to match the
FieldInfo data at some point, my code will start crashing.


Regards,
Roger