The XYArray layer control ()
can be used to plot points, lines and error bars,
but unlike the Position Layer Control
it works with table cells whose values are arrays giving multiple coordinates,
rather than single values.
It is typically used where the value stored in each cell of a column
is an array representing a whole spectrum or time series,
or some related quantity (such as errors, frequencies, epochs etc).
Each row of the table therefore corresponds to a full spectrum,
timeseries, or other array of coordinate pairs.
Use the Layers menu item or corresponding toolbar button to
add an instance to the control stack.
This control is only available for the
Plane plot.
you can add one of these controls to the stack by using the
Add XYArray Control () button
in the control panel toolbar,
or the corresponding item in the Layers menu.
Plane Plot window with an XYArray layer
This control is a Table Data control as described in Appendix A.4.2.2. That section explains the Subsets tab; the Position and Form tabs are described in more detail below.
Position tab of XYArray layer control
In the Position tab you have to fill in
array values for the X Values and Y Values
plot coordinates.
The contents can be array-valued column names or expressions.
For each row, the X and Y coordinates must be arrays of the same length
(if they are not, nothing will be plotted for that row),
though different rows may have different array lengths.
To manipulate array values, some of the expression language functions
in the Arrays class may be useful;
for instance the expression "multiply(flux,1./mean(flux))
"
can be used to normalise an input flux
array.
For most of the available plots, if either the X or Y array value is missing,
it will be interpreted as a sequence (0,1,2,...) of the same length
as the array that is present.
TOPCAT will try to fill in the X and Y coordinates with suitable
array values from the table, if it can find some.
As well as array-valued columns, array-valued table parameters
can be used, and are often suitable for the X axis;
these can be referred to using the syntax "param$<name>
",
as explained in Section 7.3.
It helps if columns are declared with fixed array sizes, where applicable.
Form tab of XYArray layer control
The Form tab lets you define how the specified data set is plotted. The list on the left gives a list of forms currently being plotted, and the panel on the right shows the detailed configuration for the currently selected form.
The available forms for an XYArray plot
(select them using the Forms button)
are currently