Various questions from a NeXus beginner

[A.Buteau]

Hello , 
I'm a new Nexus  user.

 
I'm rewriting the acquisition programs of our institute (
the LLB : Laboratoire Leon Brillouin ) which has about 25 spectrometers.

The installation of a new acquisition program is the good moment to change the data 
format and I'm very interested in the hierarchical data format philosophy.


I read the Nexus www server and I have now the following questions:

1)  Nexus defines various Groups to store datas like  NXsample  for instance 

I understood that NXSample is a NX_Group (not a NexusDataSet) but it seems to have 
a lot of attributes (name, chemical formula, electrical fiels , and so on).

I also understood that Nexus API provides functions to add attributes to data set 
only (and not to groups even if HDF allows to add Vgroup attributes ).

So my question is how should I add this kind of attributes to groups like NX_sample 
?


2)  a related question is : may somebody send me a real code example which fills 
more groups 
than the small example given in the API document. (even if I cannot directly 
compile  this example , what I want is to see how people effectivly use the Nexus 
API).


3)  And a question related to HDF and not Nexus but maybe someone in this list may 
have solved the problem: for PC platforms , HDF gives  statically linked librairies 
for the MS compiler. Unfortunatly I use the Borland compiler which cannot link with 
thes



Thanks