Tasks and Tools in CASA

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1.4 Tasks and Tools in CASA

Originally, CASA consisted of a collection of tools, combined in the so-called toolkit. Since the majority of prospective users is far more familiar with the concept of tasks, an effort is underway to replace most - if not all - toolkit functionality by tasks.

While running CASA, you will have access to and be interacting with tasks, either indirectly by providing parameters to a task, or directly by running a task. Each task has a well defined purpose, and a number of associated parameters, the values of which are to be supplied by the user. Technically speaking, tasks are built on top of tools - when you are running a task, you are running tools in the toolkit, though this should be transparent.

As more tasks are being written, and the functionality of each task is enhanced, there will be less and less reason to run tools in the toolkit. We are working toward a system in which direct access to the underlying toolkit is unnecessary for all standard data processing.

  1.4.1 What Tasks are Available?
  1.4.2 Running Tasks and Tools
   1.4.2.1 Aborting Synchronous Tasks
  1.4.3 Getting Return Values
  1.4.4 Running Tasks Asynchronously
   1.4.4.1 Monitoring Asynchronous Tasks
   1.4.4.2 Aborting Asynchronous Tasks
  1.4.5 Setting Parameters and Invoking Tasks
   1.4.5.1 The scope of parameters in CASA
   1.4.5.2 The default Command
   1.4.5.3 The go Command
   1.4.5.4 The inp Command
   1.4.5.5 The saveinputs Command
   1.4.5.6 The tget Command
   1.4.5.7 The tput Command
   1.4.5.8 The .last file
  1.4.6 Tools in CASA

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