Data Folder notes

A user on the Igor Pro mailing list requested that we add a feature to Igor that allows setting a data folder note, similar to the existing support for wave notes, that can be displayed in the Data Browser when a data folder is selected. Implementing this as a new property of data folders would require changes to the experiment file format that would likely not be backwards compatible. But it's pretty easy for us to display the contents of a fixed name string (eg. "readme") contained in a data folder. Here's how this would look:

If we decide to keep this feature, the plan would be to allow the user to configure the list of string names whose contents are possibly displayed as data folder notes. Currently the list is "readme;notes;".

My question is whether anyone is already creating a string of a certain name in various data folders to use as notes for that data folder, and if so what name are you giving to the string? If there are already people doing something like this I'd like to know if they happen to be using the same string name so that the default we provide for this setting can be as useful as possible.

I haven't used strings for data folder information yet (never thought about it) but I very much like the idea! My data is usually ordered similarly to what is shown above and often I keep experimental parameters for each folder either in a "property" wave or in individual wave notes.  

I personally would call such a string DFnotes. If you implement this, may I suggest to add a Notes flag to NewDataFolder, e.g.

 

NewDataFolder/O/S/DFN = "Temp_C:30; Start: 07_32_22; End: 07_45:20;" cell1

 

In reply to by ChrLie

ChrLie wrote:

I personally would call such a string DFnotes. If you implement this, may I suggest to add a Notes flag to NewDataFolder, e.g.

NewDataFolder/O/S/DFN = "Temp_C:30; Start: 07_32_22; End: 07_45:20;" cell1

While I can see why you would request this, I don't think it would be a good idea. That command would need to create a string variable in the new data folder (and which name would it use), or possibly overwrite an existing string variable of the magic name.