[Kst] Fwd: [Google Code-in 2011] New comment on Kst: date/time support for the ASCII data source by kharvd

Ben Lewis egretengineering at gmail.com
Sun Dec 4 05:48:55 UTC 2011


Hi Nicolas,

My requirements for ASCII date/time support are slightly different from what you have described here.

What I need may be outside the scope for this project but I thought I would mention it anyway, just 
in case this functionality can be included.

Below are the first 15 lines of a typical ACSII file I use.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
channel names:
02/12/2011 04:36:24 PM - Force (Bridge) - ch1    02/12/2011 04:36:24 PM - Force (Bridge) - ch2
start times:
2/12/2011 16:36:24.609407    2/12/2011 16:36:24.609407
dt:
0.000620
data:
-3.400914E+1    -1.141607E+1
2.413543E+0    -7.194291E+0
-2.100850E+1    -5.889673E-2
-9.260725E-1    2.200645E+0
-8.395482E+0    -2.604362E+1
-1.209291E+1    -8.294330E+0
-1.063183E+1    -1.064306E+1
8.108781E+0    -8.318977E-1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The header gives the start date and time of the test with a delta t (dt) value.  The first row of 
data corresponds to the start date and time.  Each subsequent row is offset, in time, by the value 
of delta t

Would it be possible to generate the time vector needed for kst from this data?

This file format is used by National Instruments.  If kst could support this, I think it would be 
useful for a lot of people.

Cheers, Ben



This might be outside of the project scope but my requirements are

On 4/12/2011 10:00 AM, nicolas.brisset at free.fr wrote:
> Hi,
>
> we have a Google Code-In volunteer for adding date/time support in the ASCII data source :-) See http://www.google-melange.com/gci/task/view/google/gci2011/7120226 which also includes my first comments.
>
> I have pointed him to this list, so I'm sending this message to get you prepared. Don't be surprised and please try to help him as best you can, as he has a limited time to complete the task (72 hours). Peter, I hope you'll have some time to help there because since you optimized the ASCII source it's become more complex...
> I have suggested that he checks all prerequisites before I assign the task to him, which I'm planning to do tomorrow, depending on his feedback.
>
> We probably also need to discuss a couple of things to provide him clear instructions. I should have triggered the discussion before, I know, but better late than never. I hope I'll get answers quickly even if it's the week-end.
>
> I think we should take care of the UI part, an let him do the code in asciisource.x. Here are the points on which I'd like your opinion:
> 1) how should we store the date/time info. Right now readField only stores doubles, is this the most appropriate? I haven't had time to check how we handle the case where a vector is interpreted as C time: is it stored as an array of doubles even though C time is expected to be a different type - int as far as I know? Do we do some tricks to handle the values as an int in that case, and what about resolution? A double should have 64 bits on almost all platforms, so that should allow for storing both date and time, but that involves some "cheating". In any case, we have to give him clear instructions regarding what his code should return and it's not clear to me what we can or should do... and I haven't had time to check the code :-(
> 2) in the UI we have to ask the user for the minimal input we can't guess. I'd ask for the following info, please check whether that covers all the cases you can think of. It is a bit tricky since I'd like to support both cases where date and time are together (YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS.SSS, I have such files!) and where they are in 2 vectors (e.g. YYYYMMDD and HHMMSS.SSS in 2 separate vectors). The idea would be to allow having one column which contains time and possibly date, and another optional one in case we have a separate column for the date. Since the drawing code probably considers only one X vector, we would need to merge the two in case they are separate.
>     a. (bool) ASCII-formatted time/date
>     b. (QString) name of the time/date vector
>     c. (QString) format string of the time/date vector, e.g. HH:MM:SS or YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS.SSS
>     d. (QString) Meaning of 0, i.e. if 000000.000 in the file actually means 20111203-120000.000 in reality because the experiment started today at noon, then must have a way to let kst know it (I think that was also Matt's request recently)
>     e. (bool) Separate ASCII-formatted date
>     f. (QString) name of the date vector
>     g. (QString) format string of the date vector, e.g. YYYYMMDD
>     h. (QString) Meaning of 0 for the date (though I doubt we really need this, if the date is indicated in a dedicated column then most probably it will not start from arbitrary 0). Actually I'd start without this option and add it later only in case we find real-world cases where we need it.
>
> Well, as it seems this was another one of my too long mails. Sorry for that, but I think the discussion is very important as we've already had many requests for that feature, and it's on the roadmap for the near future anyway.
>
> Thanks for your support/comments, and don't hesitate to throw in other points if I have missed something important.
>
> Nicolas
>
> ----- Mail transféré -----
> De: no-reply at google-melange.appspotmail.com
> À: "nicolas brisset"
> Envoyé: Samedi 3 Décembre 2011 14:24:43
> Objet: [Google Code-in 2011] New comment on Kst: date/time support for the ASCII data source by kharvd
>
> Hi,
>
> kharvd has left the following comment at Kst: date/time support for the ASCII data source http://www.google-melange.com/gci/task/view/google/gci2011/7120226 :
>
> I would like to work on this task.
>
> Greetings,
> The Google Open Source Programs Team
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