Qimera "qimera-command"

qimera-command is a utility that exposes a simplified subset of Qimera's processing abilities via a command line interface for the purposes of scripting. While the full, graphical version of Qimera will always provide a richer processing experience, scripting parts of their processing workflow may make sense for organisations with very formalised and/or repetitive procedures. In most cases, qimera-command will be used to automate the preparation of a project to do as much of the busy work as possible before a human operator takes over processing, inspection and cleaning in the graphical Qimera interface.

Initial releases provide a limited subset of Qimera's features. While this feature set will likely grow in later releases, not all of Qimera's abilities are likely or even capable of being exposed in qimera-command. Each invocation of qimera-command will execute a single procecessing job. More complex processing workflows can then be built up by executing several jobs in series via a sequence of qimera-command commands. Note that qimera-command was designed with scripting in mind, not to be a interactive command line interface for human operators. As a result, its command syntax can feel quite verbose and very particular. This is intentional as qimera-command wants to be 100% sure it understands what it is being told to do and avoids guessing or assuming user intention.

As it is a command line utility, qimera-command has no desktop or start menu shortcut. To launch it, open a terminal, navigate to the {{bin}} directory your Qimera installation and run qimera-command.exe or ./qimera-command depending on the conventions of your operating system. For the remainder of this document we will use Windows syntax.

qimera-command  aims to be largely self documenting via its command line help. To begin, run qimera-command.exe --help. In addition to explaining some general command line flags, this will list all the job types that can be passed to the --job flag. To learn about the behaviour and input to a particular job, run qimera-command.exe --job=<job-name> --help. Each job type takes a specific set of flags, although many flags are common to multiple jobs.

Flags must be introduced with a double hyphen. For flags that take an value, that value may be specified using an equal sign (--flag=somevalue) or a space (--flag somevalue). The order of flags on the command line is typically not important. Some jobs can also take a list of position arguments at the end of the command line which are not introduced by flags. Special characters (spaces, new lines, asterisks, etc.) must be properly quoted or escaped according to the rules of your shell or scripting language. For example: --project-folder="E:\My Projects\Initial Survey" --file=My\ File\ with\ Spaces.txt --note="***Uncorrected Values***"

While running the given job, qimera-command may print relevant information to the command line. When the job is finished successfully, qimera-command will complete with an exit code of 0. All other exit codes indicate a failure of some kind, with an explanatory message printed to the command line.