graph management

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Fri, 11/06/2009 - 01:00 pm

Does anybody have any ideas/suggestions for managing multiple graphs in an experiment.

I currently have an experiment that has close to 50 graphs that I need to reference at various times. The graph macros menu is becoming rather unwieldy (and it's getting harder to come up with distinctive names).

Ideally I would like to sort the graph macros into folders (or submenus in the graph macros), similarly to the structure in the Data Browser (and perhaps a separate folder for style macros).

Any suggestions or code snippets are welcomed. I'm thinking perhaps that I could generate a User menu and populate it with the various macros from the main Macro window via IgorMenuHook? The question there would be how to automatically parse the Macro window. There are indicators within each macro that could be used to achieve the desired categorization (mostly the data folder labels containing the source data). I am however entirely unclear how to search the Macro window or how to dynamically create a User Menu.

--Andreas
If your problem is that you want the code for different windows to be organized, you can create additional procedure files and put the code for some macros in one and the code for other macros in another. When you resave the recreation Macro, Igor will realize that you have the code in a different procedure window (that is, not the main Procedure window) and will overwrite the macro in place.

If the problem is more with management of 50 windows, many of which might be open at one time, you could either buy more monitors (expensive) or use http://www.igorexchange.com/project/ACL_WindowDesktops, which will allow you to use up to 4 "virtual" desktops within Igor. You assign a graph to one of the desktops, and you can switch between desktops and only the graphs assigned to a given desktop will be visible.

As long as you have this package enabled graph windows will remain assigned to the proper virtual desktop even if you close the experiment and open it again later. If you use the experiment on a system without the package installed, you'll be able to view all the windows without using the package. The package simply tells Igor to hide the windows not on the currently selected desktop, but you can use the Windows->Show Igor menu to get them back.

November 6, 2009 at 05:42 pm - Permalink

Thanks.

The multiple desktops might be exactly what I'm looking for. I'll check it out.

November 6, 2009 at 07:32 pm - Permalink