tmstools - Module

Description
Currently the TMS tools package, tmstools, consists of a set of table browsers specifically tuned to the individual TMS tables. In addition to providing a detailed view of each TMS table the browsers provide facilities for manipulating the tables, incorporate links between tables and, in some cases, links to other Glish applications.

tmstools itself is a front-end to the actual tools. Including tmstools.g starts a simple GUI containing a number of named buttons. Pressing a button starts one of the specific table browsers. The tmstools application additionally acts as a server for the table browsers providing a channel through which the browsers can communicate.

The applications currently contained in the tmstools package are:

measurement: browser for the TMS Measurement table.
resource: browser for the TMS Resource table.
dataset: browser for the TMS DataSet table.
obslog: browser for the TMS ObsLog table.
logbook: browser for the TMS LogBook table.

The tables accessed by these application have predefined names and are expected to reside in the directory specified by the environment variable tms_tbl. This environment variable needs to be defined before starting tmstools. It must be set to the directory containing the TMS tables.

The TMS table browsers have a similar layout consisting of main frame with a menu-bar at the top. Under this is a list box where single lines entries from the table are displayed, one table entry per row. Below the list box is a status bar. The status bar typically displays the last query performed on the table (accounting for the current contents of the list box) and how many matches were found.

Reflecting the similarity in physical layout, user interaction with the browsers typically follows a particular pattern. A TMS browser is opened by clicking on one of the buttons in the tmstools GUI. Each browser performs a default query on their respective table at startup and the result of that query is displayed in the browser's list box. In most cases the default query is to fetch all entries in the table which occurred within the last 2 days. However, it is possible to redefined the default query by adding an entry to your .aipsrc file (see documentation on specific browsers below for details). After the default query the table can be re-queried via the query menu button to provide a variety of different views of the table.

The information displayed on each line in the browser list box is often a subset of the information contained in a particular row from the table. In such situations additional information about a particular entry is made available by double clicking on the entry with the left mouse button.

Many of the browsers offer a number of operations for modifying/updating the TMS tables. The details are specific to each browser and are described below.

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