Saving and Restoring Lists

The contents of the displayed Lists (except the Paste List) can be written either individually or en mass using items in the File menu. Likewise, they can be read and the corresponding Lists restored. Reading and writing lists are done by the static functions in class ScanList.

The lists that can be written to ascii files have names with a prederermined extension:

Class ScanList static function WriteScanList converts Lists to ascii form and function ReadScanList converts these files into Lists. In ascii form, each new scan starts with a ^L (Control L) followed by the Scan name. Explicit scan entries are written in the form "Name value". This conversion is done by looping over the Fields in a Scan and using member function GiveValue to return a array of strings if appropriate. When a Scan entry is read from the ascii file the linked list of Scan Fields is searched for a member myName matching the Name from the ascii file. When a match, is found the Field function ParseValue is used to convert a String to the appropriate internal form. After all scan entries from the ascii file have been processed, Scan function FinishParse completes any disgestion of the input data.