2008 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > User Defined Types in NetCDF-4
16.11 Variable-Length Types
Variable-Length types provide support for ragged arrays.
- Has a name and a base type
- Multiple variables may use same type
- May be nested to create multidimensional variable-length types
- Access to a variable-length value is atomic
- Length and values written or read together
- Can't know length until value is read
- In C/Fortran, library allocates memory for value
2008 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > User Defined Types in NetCDF-4