Autoplot Application (20140426a)

Interesting features seen by Emfisis instruments on RBSP.

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 (2014-04-21):

• 1180: use autoranging consistent with Series for Scatter
• Craig pointed out where makeAggregation was converting 20130402T00 to $Y$m$d-$H (T to -).
• rte 0948397190: runtime error in HDF5 reader when file is not found.
• 1129: experiments with rendering after we would still see occasional failures.
• lanlNNRebinner supports time-varying Y tags.
• FUNCT or FUNCTION in C-implementation of CDF reader
• improve feedback with errors from VOTable reader.
• FileStorageModel had an bug where getFiles would return multiple references to the same file, since 2014/3/14
• FileStorageModel was missing getField to make clean way to get the version ($v)

Older Bugfixes:

• rte 1178734273: occasional NullPointer on Windows fixed in file dialog.
• rte 1677040602: NullPointerException caused by thread issue.
• extraneous messages about can't serialize Level fixed.
• embed data didn't work properly with local files, because of double slashes that matter in zip files.
• improve handling of ephemeris ticks (TCA) when TCA data has gaps by limiting interpolation gaps.
• getPropertyType had Number as the type of SCALE_TYPE, not String.
• fix layout looks for rows with the same ID and unused rows.
• rte1171026815: runtime error during transitions due to unplottable bundle stored in series renderer.
• #03B1; prints "xxx" so that its more clear that it should have been #x03B1;
• USER_PROPERTIES from Ascii reader caused crash when FFTPower was looking for Translation property. Thanks Scott for pointing this out!
• FileStorageModelNew renamed to FileStorageModel after 7 years...

Features:

• DataPointRecorderNew supports events lists, will replace DataPointRecorder
• rank 0 DDataSet.putValue checks rank because it's easy to forget the index
• SparseDataSetBuilder checks that setLength was called.
• Units.parse supports parsing 0x0000FF as 255, to support events lists.
• parseISO8601Range now throws ParseException, before this was a runtime exception
• introduce butterworth filter
• introduce indexOfBundledDataSet
• draw a box on the layout tab to hint at multiple selections, make the handle easier to grab
• EventQueueBlocker_1 renamed to EventQueueBlocker. FileStorageModelNew renamed to FileStorageModel.
• EnumerationUnits are always backed by a String context, was the class.
• enumerationUnit entries can be defined within the qstream as they occur.
• FileStorageModel has getFilesFor( String[] ref )
• FileStorageModel has getField("v") to retrieve version and other custom fields.

Less recent features:

• replaceFile dialog improved with pickfile button.
• allowEmbedData system property added to support maturing this feature.
• AP_WGET, AP_CURL, allowEmbedData added to autoplot_data/config/system.properties
• autoplot.jar launch script allows relative URIs, so "autoplot myfile.cdf" now works from command line.
• autoplot.jar launch script looks for JRE arguments (-J-Xmx4G) and introduces --headless

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.