Hi, Fist let me apologize for the size of this e-mail, it seems to have grown a little out of proportion.
Similar to a recently posted question, I use a 2- and 3-D MHD code in cartesian and cylindrical coordinates, and for historical reasons and the desire not to break working data processing routines I'm stuck with a certain file format. It's simple really; it's entirely composed of fortran unformatted file records in the order of 1) header info. 2) density 3) pressure 4,5,6) velocity components 7,8,9) magnetic field components 10) radiative losses etc... There is one of these "data dumps" for each "time of interest". In a recent email Chris Pelkie convinced me that the native Data Explorer file format was so general that once I started using it I'd never turn back, so I tried. What I want to do is to write a native dx header file to describe the cell centered data in the data output files I'm currently using. From the samples and appendix B of the users guide I've managed to visualize one array of the data file at a time, but am getting a little stuck. (Here comes the plea for help.) If you could give me some hints on the following I'd be very appreciative! 1) I find that I'm repeating the name of the file over and over again in the header in the form of: object 3 class array type float rank 0 items 40000 data file "DipoleWind.040",32 Can I use another object as a kind of short-hand or macro for the file name in quotes? I've not had much luck playing with this idea. :-( 2) Does DX "understand" the concept of a vector field such as a velocity field or a magnetic field? If so, how can I tell it to read each component of a velocity field into an array object and then collect them into a vector field object in a dx header file. 3) If so, would it be confused by a 3-D vector field and an essentially 2-D space? That is viewing it in the r-z plane of cylindrical coordinates (r,phi,z). 4) For clindrically symmetric simulations, does it make sense to describe to DX that the "connections" are cylindrically symmetric rings? If so, how? This is equivalent to telling dx that it's positions are not points, but circular line elements, which I don't think it'll accept. 5) I'd like to have some interactive way of selecting which data in a data file to view, like choosing density or pressure. How do I add a "selector" to a net to look at and display the names of the objects? Let me guess I should be using print"rd" on the output of the import module? I'll go do that right now. Thanks much for any and all help! Tom
