SD Testing Report
S.Myers 

2007-03-04

Based upon my experiences building the ASAP
SDtasks and regressions scripts, here are some
comments on the ASAP package as currently 
incorporated into CASA.

sd.plotter

  currently you can get hardcopy only after making a viewed plot,
  should choose device for plotting when you set up the plotter.

  multi-panel plotting poor.  currently can only seem to add lines
  etc to first panel through asap (or is it just bad documentation).
  
  sd.plotter.set_range() sets the same range for multiple panels,
  but should be able to set the range for each independently,
  including the default

  plots need to be made a lot better.  In principle matplotlib can
  make "publication quality" figures, but in practice you have to
  do alot of work to make it do that, and our plots are not good.

  the sd.plotter object remembers things throughout the session
  and thus can easily get confused.  For example you have to
  reset the range sd.plotter.set_range() if you have ever set it
  manually.  This is not the best behavior but maybe we have to
  live with it.

sd.selector

  only allows one selection of each type, should be possible
  to make union of selections (without resorting to query)
  for the set_name (the others work off lists of ifs or scans).

sd.scantable

  there is no useful inline help on the scantable constructor
  when you do "help sd.scantable", nor in "help sd"

  the inline help for scantable.summary claims that there is
  a verbose parameter, but there isnt.  the scantable.verbosesummary
  asaprc parameter (e.g. in sd.rcParams) does nothing.

  you cannot usually set the rest frequencies for GBT data, mostly
  because scantable.set_restfreqs iterates over IFs and if you have
  missing IFs (like you selected 0 and 2) it will crash dealing with
  the missing ones.  You can do it at the beginning when you have
  consecutive IFs but only for consecutive ones starting from 0. 
  It should work on the IFs that are actually in the scantable, and in
  that order.  THIS IS THE MOST SERIOUS BUG RIGHT NOW.
  You can see the problem in this crash:

/home/casa/linux_rhe/python/2.5/asap/scantable.py in set_restfreqs(self, freqs, unit)
    802                 for i in xrange(len(freqs)):
    803                     sel.set_ifs([i])
--> 804                     self._setselection(sel)
    805                     self._setrestfreqs(freqs[i], "",unit)
    806                 self._setselection(savesel)


  need a method to query the antenna name
  DONE: scantable.get_antennaname added by Tak on 1-Mar

  add to scantable.stats:
      maxord, minord - the ordinate (channel, vel, freq) of the max/min
  
general

  we should have CASA use the ASAP scantables rather than requiring
  conversion to MS

  should be a "sdhelp" equivalent of toolhelp and tasklist for the
  sd tools and tasks

  the current output of ASAP is verbose, should we default by
  setting sd.rcParams['verbose']=False ? or leave it to the user?