What is the new IOC file format in STM32CubeMX2 ?

[Mikk Leini]

Hi @Ghofrane GSOURI. I just noticed new STM32CubeMX2. It's for STM32C series currently but I downloaded it to check it out. It looks very nice, that's for sure. Yet this topic is about file format. MX2 re-uses .ioc file extension but it's format is strange. It is made of JSON/Python?? multiline strings containing JSON and YAML. I don't understand what format is it exactly. The data inside it is also hard to understand and there is a lot of clutter, like IDs, URIs, URLs, descriptions, etc. Why on earth would somebody put field description text beside field name and value?

If I may express may opinion - this is awful. It's even worse than old format. It won't be easy to merge changes in such file. It looks like it's a mash-up of multiple tools/libraries serialized states. CubeMX developers are going to have backward and forward compatibility problems and end users are going to suffer if bugs emerge.

I would like to suggest one more file format: TOML

Edit: Moved from New IOC file format suggestion discussion.

[MorkBeck · Accepted solution]

Hello @Mikk Leini ,

We agree with the feedback.

The current IOC2 format changed several times during development, and that has caused real issues, especially for readability and version-management workflows.

We are working on a better alternative that is more lightweight and behaves much better with diff/merge tools. I don’t want to overpromise on timing yet, but this is clearly an area that needs improvement.

[Mikk Leini]

Thank you @MorkBeck . I'm glad ST is not sitting still and continues to improve the toolset along with the hardware.