Autoplot Application (#{tag})

Scary sounds from the RBSP-B's magnetometer. Listen here. Happy Holloween!

Autoplot allows plotting of data from many data sources, including remote CDF files and OpenDAP servers. Datasets are identified with URIs, and by the URI's extension, data are loaded into the internal data model. Data are then displayed by guessing the rendering method and axis ranges to provide a reasonable, useful view of the data. Data can then be additionally processed with other operations like smooth and FFT, and Jython scripting provides a capable programming environment.

This is the Autoplot v2019a branch. This is an update to the production version containing bugfixes and minor new features. Java 7 is now required. Java 8 will be required sometime soon.

Run with 4GB of memory (64-bit Java only): autoplot_4GB.jnlp

Single-jar version, autoplot.jar, can be run without network access and from the command line.

Mac DMG Release is available.

Bugfixes (2019-10-31 r24273):

• vap+audiosystem: would record for twice as long as it needed to.
• cache IndexOutOfBounds when events renderer sees an empty dataset (ds[0,4]).
• Run Batch tool replaces " " in output names with "_" so that filenames don't break. Thanks, George!
• add read timeouts on CDAWeb web service calls.
• 20191023a had new bug where reducex would drop DEPEND_1.
• v2019a_10 had bug where CDF files containing both zvariables and rvariables could not be read.
• check VARIABLE_PURPOSE in CDF Metadata when filtering parameter list.

Older Bugfixes:

• 2212: New Das2Stream parser did not handle Voyager peaks-and-averages properly, with data coming from cache.
• dataset command now parses "2014-01-09 00:00 to 01:00" as datum range, not datum with enumeration units.
• 1659: double-call on monitor when cancel was pressed in "Run Batch"
• Run Batch tool replaces "/" in output names with "_" so that filenames don't break. Thanks, Connor!
• dataset(datumRange) could not be used with createEvent, because it was mistaken for a 2-element array. Thanks, Kristoff!
• mute messages at command line startup about the Help system, which is not used anyway.
• BIN_MAX and BIN_MIN are correlative properties, and slice1 should slice them.
• odd bug where .vap files wouldn't load from GitHubFileSystem during testing resolved by loading into memory.
• 2212: New Das2Stream parser did not handle Voyager peaks-and-averages properly.
• 2202: reset method needs to resize Autoplot GUI as well to support scripts.
• 2206: reduce=T supported in aggregation, before high rank datasets were not reduced.
• 2206: CDF library initialization sped up, noticeable when there are many variables.
• 2193: handle redirects, put in code for github.com to get vaps from github rawusercontent website.
• 2202: screen size of loaded .vap is often incorrect.

Features:

• 360: allow color type in jython script parameters.
• 334: allow where constaint to have slice, so Z component can be used to filter with URIs like ...&where=BGSEc[:,2].lt(0)
• 360: allow either values or enum to be used in script parameter constraints.
• popup slicers have write to PDF button.

Less recent features:

• New JNLP signature for Oct 2019-September 2020.
• Jython scripts can now have labels on enumerated values, like { 'values':['A','B'], labels:['RBSP-A','RBSP-B'] }
• future proofing scripting commands setScriptTitle, setScriptDescription, which will be used to improve GUI.
• command line option --version.
• introduce --sandbox switch which starts a very permissive sandbox.
• BinaryDataSource editor now shows the bytes of the first record.
• DDataSet gets addValues(qds) so that high-rank datasets can be accumulated quickly.
• new signature for JNLP release.
• add pointAtOffset to annotation command
• 696: support for HAPI 3.0 references.
• IFFT takes Real and Complex spectra to make a waveform.
• ScriptGUIServlet allows script to be run, creating web GUI for parameters and displaying the output.

Known issues:

• see Source Forge
• Bugs often have a four-digit ID and can be reviewed with https://sourceforge.net/p/autoplot/bugs/<ID>/.
• Features typically have a three-digit ID and can be reviewed with https://sourceforge.net/p/autoplot/feature-requests/<ID>/.

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.