missing documentation of 'Make Data Source Local'?

[hproe]

Hi -

Under 'Data Sources' the User's Guide gives a description of 'Wrtie Local Grid'. However, for the case of image data I cannot find documentation for very useful 'Make Data Source Local'. Am I overlooking it?

HP

[bobc]

Hi HP -

Thanks for pointing out the missing documentation of "Make Data Source Local". I will update the documentation to describe what this menu item does.

In the short-term, here is how the option works.

1. Load your data into the Field Selector.
2. Display the band/calibration you are interested in saving. Note that this step probably shouldn't be necessary, but in the current state the field must be displayed in order to save it to an AREA file. I've written up fixing this as Inquiry 2450.
3. Right-click on the data source and select "Make Data Source Local". For Folder Name, select the destination directory of your AREA file. Optionally, for Prefix, set the name you want to assign the AREA (note that ".area" will be appended to the prefix once the area is written). Click Save.
4. In the next window, select the calibration you want to save to the AREA. Note that multiple calibrations can be selected, but only one calibration will be saved per AREA file. For example, if you choose RAW, BRIT, and TEMP, three AREAs will be written (one for RAW, one for BRIT, and one for TEMP).

If you have any questions about this, please let me know.

Thanks again -
Bob Carp

[hproe]

Hi Bob -

This is fine by me, thank you. Your additional point 2 is a good idea , either.

I also appreciate that the filename includes the band. However, the unit is not shown - the filename just ends with '_Unit_Pos'. Can this be amended?

There is another inconvenience when reading the AREA data again. In the Field Selector just date and time of the granule are shown, no indication of band (and unit) is given. Imagine working with several bands Or is there trick to get useful fields?

HP

[bobc]

Hi HP -

Good observation on the 'unit' in the file names. It looks like McV is picking up on the band and position numbers just fine, but not the unit. I'm not seeing any kind of a workaround for this, so I wrote this up as Inquiry 2451.

As for the field listing when AREA files are added through the local file chooser, I can definitely see the benefit of having the file name available in this case. I've written up Inquiry 2452 for this enhancement. If a single AREA is loaded at a time, you can mouse over the time in the Field Selector and see the file name. However, if you load in multiple files at once, mousing over will list something like '3 files', or however many files were loaded from the Data Sources tab of the Data Explorer. In McV 1.5, there was a feature added to the Field Selector with NetCDF/grib data that allows changing if the fields are listed with shortname or longname. Perhaps something similar could be applied for AREA files loaded through the local files chooser, where the user could switch between timestamp and filename.

Thanks for your suggestions -
Bob