Malformed values of Content Label attribute

The Content Label attribute has Value Representation CS, which is restricted to [A-Z_0-9] characters. This is currently implemented incorrectly in highdicom. In addition, pydicom doesn’t complain if the value is not valid. Therefore, we will need to perform additional checks to ensure the values are valid.

[hackermd]

Ideally, pydicom would assert the value representation when the value is set for a given data element. Maybe a discussion worth having the pydicom developers.

I think we’ve been down this path before and they are not keen on this idea (huge backwards incompatibility issues, although I would argue producing invalid files is worse…). However, if the global configuration parameter pydicom.config.enforce_valid_values is True, then pydicom does have the behaviour you describe. Unfortunately, there are not checks for every value representation, and specifically there does not appear to be a check for CS. (I personally added the checks for DS earlier this year, for example).

Yeah…I am not a fan of the global configuration and would much rather prefer an enforce_valid_values parameter for the constructor of the Dataset. It may be time to restart that conversation.

If we could add support for the remaining VRs to pydicom that would probably save us a lot of checks in highdicom.

[CPBridge]

Ideally, pydicom would assert the value representation when the value is set for a given data element. Maybe a discussion worth having the pydicom developers.

I think we’ve been down this path before and they are not keen on this idea (huge backwards incompatibility issues, although I would argue producing invalid files is worse…). However, if the global configuration parameter pydicom.config.enforce_valid_values is True, then pydicom does have the behaviour you describe. Unfortunately, there are not checks for every value representation, and specifically there does not appear to be a check for CS. (I personally added the checks for DS earlier this year, for example).