Autoplot Application (20140305b)

I encountered a surprise feature of the script editor, that CTRL-K shows completions based on symbols in the script.

Autoplot attempts to allow plotting of data from many data sources, including local files and OpenDAP servers. Datasets are identified with URIs, and by the URI's extension a module is used to load the data into the internal data model. Data is then displayed by guessing the rendering method and axis ranges to provide a reasonable, useful view of the data.

This is the Autoplot2013b branch. This is an update to the production version containing bugfixes and minor new features. Java 6 is now required.

Single-jar version, autoplot.jar, can be run without network access and from the command line. Note CDFs are only supported via the Java-based reader and Autoplot will attempt to use it when the C-based version is not available.

Bugfixes (2014-03-05):

• Bob pointed out case where error bars would be left on the Series renderer display.
• more findbugs cleanup (down to 80)
• continue to remove synchronized code that could cause hangs
• add busy feedback to dataSetSelector web activity, since this can get hung up and the user has no indication of what's going on.
• periodic keyword for time parsing properly triggers TSB
• contour always had extra point (0,0) in result.
• clean up example in vap+inline GUI which was incorrect
• minor cleanup of wget-based file system.
• completions based on local cache folded case improperly.
• support EMFISIS hourly files when suggesting aggregations
• rte_0263418513: NetCDF spaces were not handled properly.
• clean up monitors, after seeing axis ephemeris / das2server would sometimes leave monitor hanging

Older Bugfixes:

• allow timeout on eventsRenderer to be adjusted (property under controller node)
• reset scanRange when axis units are reset.
• all GUI initialization is done on the event thread, fixing occasional hangs on Linux.
• unnecessary fold case in local cache completions prevented "Flight" from showing
• suggestion aggregation code supports 20140216T03
• sanity checks on generate timeranges limit the number to 1000000 instead of hanging createPngWalk
• loosen up excessive synchronized block use in DataSourceController that could get hung up needlessly.
• spaces in NetCDF file names caused problems after check for matlab was installed. Thanks sspagnol!
• createEvent doesn't make so many assumptions about the dataset it's appending to.
• upper case constants in inline data source were always used as property values. Now only valid property names are treated this way.
• "scan" buttons renamed "step" buttons in anticipation of events lists
• George pointed out that slicer popups are offscreen on Windows when window is maximized.
• Recent startup code changes would occasionally cause hang on Linux when script panel was showing.
• mon.finished was never called in Das2DataSource, leaving spinner when emphemeris data is loaded.
• DE CDF data had rank 0 DELTA_PLUS. This is supported now.
• Non-time strings got into the time range dialog, causing parse errors.
• update version in about dialog
• new code that sorts das2server folders and files would drop nodes. (Thanks Chris!)
• the vap files don't save the displayTitle property (Thanks Chris!)
• 1157: allow renders to specify if they have autoranged a dimension.
• file chooser in the resourceURI dialog didn't set the current directory properly.

Features:

• open local data file shows .vap files as well.
• SemanticOps.xtagsDataset supports bundles
• DataSourceFactorysupports discovery to a non-GUI element to avoid having to create a GUI just to see if discovery is possible
• export CDF data allows the cdf variable name to be set explicitly
• step/scan button hidden on axis ends now scans to next available data
• time range tool shows all orbits, not just those around the current time.

Less recent features:

• internal rbsp orbits updated to 2014-03-11
• pngwalk tool GUI shows option for events file
• minor tweaks to the aggregation data source editor
• events list property in the vap.
• introduce Event List tool for using long events lists to control axes.
• introduce where support for text files.
• introduce support for ordinal data in CDFs
• another round of findbugs
• remove use of obsolete classes like DasDie.
• another round of findbugs (down to 98 from 250+)
• improve support for buckshot data in spectrogram rebinners
• formatDataSet back to ScriptContext in new attempts to clean up security.

Known issues:

• see Source Forge

This completes the feature set for the new production branch. No major features will be added before branching this version. A production branch will be started in a couple of weeks, and the "Start Autoplot" link at the top of autoplot.org will run this version. Feedback on the function and quality of this release is greatly appreciated!

Data is input from:

• ASCII files (.dat,.txt)
• CSV files (.csv)
• Binary files (.bin)
• CDF files(.cdf)
• Excel spread sheets (.xls)
• das2Streams (.d2s or .das2Stream)
• ViRBO's TSDS server
• CDAWeb data server (vap+cdaweb:)
• das2servers (vap+das2server:)
• QStreams (.qds), QDataSet on a das2Stream
• Plasma Wave Group das2 Server
• NetCDF files (.nc,.ncml)
• HDF5 files (.h5,.hdf5)
• DODs servers (.dds)
• Cluster Exchange Format files (.cef)
• Fits Format Files
• Images (.jpg, .png, .gif)
• Wav audio files (.wav)

This is not complete, and limitations include:

• Quantities of rank 3 dimensionality (e.g. flux(Time,Energy,pitch) are plotted by slicing.
• Quantities of rank 4 dimensionality (e.g. flux(Time,Energy,azimuth,sector) are plotted by slicing twice.

autoplot.org is the wiki website, and contains more information than this launch page.