The SDCalc GUI

The graphical user interface for SDCalc is a work in progress, and currently caters to the somewhat narrow needs of the first operation it provides: spectrum averaging. Some (possibly most) of the current GUI will appear in the the more mature, and more complete program.

Here are the key features:

1. A menubar provides a standard ``File'' pulldown menu, with menubuttons ``Open'' and ``Exit''; the Open button leads to a standard file selection dialog box, for finding aips++ tables (or optionally, any kind of file on disk).
2. At the top of the main program window, just below the menubar, there is a ``Results Manager'' - all opened tables, working sets, selections, and other intermediate results appear here, by name, as selectable items in a scrollable list. This manager also provides some description of the currently-selected result, and allows you to rename the result if you wish. ``View'' and ``Delete'' buttons are also provided. Viewing is a data-type-specific operation. For instance, viewing a table means (more accurately: will soon mean) to run the tablebrowser; viewing a spectrum means to plot it; viewing a working set will probably mean to popup a ``working set browser'' which allows you to navigate through the scans, view header values, and plot spectra at will.
3. A selection tool is in the center of the main program window. This consists of (currently) six comboboxes - a Windows-inspired GUI component that combines a 1-line text entry and display widget, and a scrollable list widget, with a couple of control buttons. There is a combobox for the following categories of data in an SDRecord header or SDIterator:

   Object

   The object field.

   Record number

   The record number in the SDIterator.

   Scan number

   The scan_number field.

   Date

   The ut_date field.

   LST

   The lst field.

   Rest frequency

   The rest_frequency field.

   All of the unique values in each category are extracted from the current input data source (usually an sdfits file previously converted to an aips++ table, but optionally a subset of such a table, created by sdcalc). Each of these values is then added to the list associated with each combobox, and with a few simple mouse actions you can specify the subset of the data you wish to consider for subsequent operations (currently, just spectrum averaging).

4. At the bottom of the main program window is the ``Average Spectra'' window, with a few buttons for specifying alignment and weighting options, and another button to actually calculate the average, using the current selection (as specified in the selection tool) with the specified options. Once calculated, the average spectrum appears as a variable in the results manager (see item 2 above); the ``view'' button plots this average in the plotting window. (Note that the plotter, not previously mentioned, is a separate aips++ program, which runs in its own window, and which communicates over the glish software bus.