Browse the Data

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3.8 Browse the Data

The browsetable task is available for viewing data directly (and handles all CASA tables, including Measurement Sets, calibration tables, and images). This task brings up the CASA Qt casabrowser, which is a separate program. You can launch this from outside casapy.

The default inputs are:

#  browsetable :: Browse a table (MS, calibration table, image)

tablename         =         ’’  #   Name of input table
async             =      False  #  If true the taskname must be started using browsetable(...)

Currently, its single input is the tablename, so an example would be:

browsetable(’ngc5921.ms’)

For an MS such as this, it will come up with a browser of the MAIN table (see Fig 3.10). If you want to look at sub-tables, use the tab table keywords along the left side to bring up a panel with the sub-tables listed (Fig 3.11), then choose (left-click) a table and View:Details to bring it up (Fig 3.12). You can left-click on a cell in a table to view the contents.

Figure 3.10: browsetable: The browser displays the main table within a frame. You can scroll through the data (x=columns of the MAIN table, and y=the rows) or select a specific page or row as desired. By default, 1000 rows of the table are loaded at a time, but you can step through the MS in batches.

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Figure 3.11: browsetable: You can use the tab for Table Keywords to look at other tables within an MS. You can then double-click on a table to view its contents.

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Figure 3.12: browsetable: Viewing the SOURCE table of the MS.

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Note that one useful feature is that you can Edit the table and its contents. Use the Edit table choice from the Edit menu, or click on the Edit button. Be careful with this, and make a backup copy of the table before editing!

Use the Close Tables and Exit option from the Files menu to quit the casabrowser.

There are a lot of features in the casabrowser that are not fully documented here. Feel free to explore the capabilities such as plotting and sorting!

ALERT: You are likely to find that the casabrowser needs to get a table lock before proceeding. Use the clearstat command to clear the lock status in this case.

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