[Nexus] Correct way to specify multiple signals

[Osborn, Raymond]

Hi Armando,
I have been experimenting with the auxiliary signal idea and seeing whether it really does allow improved functionality, and I am warming to the idea. As long as they all share the same axes, then it does make a combined plot easier to produce. It has required a little tinkering with NeXpy, but I now have an experimental feature that adds a “Plot All Signals” contextual menu to any NXdata group that has the ‘auxiliary_signals’ attribute, producing a plot with a legend automatically added.

I’ll release this in the next couple of days as v0.10.9, after I have confirmed that we have fixed the external link issue that your colleague raised. I think it makes sense to let people experiment with new features before they finally get ratified by NIAC. It’s easy to tweak things in NeXpy if people suggest improvements.

Ray

On Jan 20, 2018, at 10:25 AM, V. Armando Sole <sole at esrf.fr<mailto:sole at esrf.fr>> wrote:

Hi Ray,

Thank you for your very positive feedback.

I have to admit the use case of common axes probably covers more than 95% of my use case applications.

I think now the question to be answered is if the case of not having common axes is ever to be considered of generic interest or not because, unlike the implementation of auxiliary_signals, the implementation of auxiliary_axes would potentially allow signals with different lengths and that would break code supporting auxiliary_signals and not checking for the presence of auxiliary_axes.

At this point there is no code supporting the auxiliary_signals feature and my opinion would be to leave the door open but I will understand (and respect the decision) if this forum votes against it because we are talking about a small number of use cases (basically at this point I can only think about a) the fit with the fitted curve at higher resolution, b) a picture with partial maps on top of it c) a discontinuous region covered by several raster scans).

Best regards,

Armando

--
Ray Osborn, Senior Scientist
Materials Science Division
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, IL 60439, USA
Phone: +1 (630) 252-9011
Email: ROsborn at anl.gov<mailto:ROsborn at anl.gov>
[cid:A8C67EEE-1518-40D7-8B77-ADDF180BE81A at hsd1.il.comcast.net.]
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