I think I picked up a bug in the study/XXX/media API that generate the DICOMDIR file structure in a ZIP
The DICOMDIR file generated has empty serie descriptions for all series inside of a study
The DICOM itself are OK but the generated DICOMDIR has empty series description.
Other DICOMDIR I used have series description, since the DICOM parser read only the DICOMDIR to display series the fact that series description are missing make really difficult for the user to reach the needed series.
Actually even not mandatory it is limiting.
You are correct that you can recover the Series description from the original DICOM but it forces you to parse the DICOM.
If you are in a CD this is a significant cost in speed because you need to access multiple files while the access time of a CD is really long.
Not only the “Series Description” DICOM tag is optional, but because it is a Type-3 tag, adding it to the DICOMDIR results in a so-called “Extended SOP Class” that implies a specific treatment in the DICOM Conformance Statement: http://dicom.nema.org/medical/Dicom/2016a/output/chtml/part02/sect_7.3.html
As a consequence, including “Series Description” should never be the default behavior of Orthanc.
To take your request into account, I have added an optional argument “?extended” to the “/…/…/media” URI that will, if present, result in adding Type-3 arguments (currently, only “Series Description”) to the DICOMDIR while generating a warning in the Orthanc logs. Here is the corresponding change in the mainline of Orthanc: https://bitbucket.org/sjodogne/orthanc/commits/b340f0a9022c635425753eb48742574705e0454c
It adds a new “/tools/create-media-extended” URI that behaves similarly to “/tools/create-media”, but adding the type-3 tags in the DICOMDIR. For instance: