Channel Properties Not Showing up in File Browser View

[AnthonyC]

I'm developing a plugin for my data and I'm running into a couple issues.  Both of these issue's are described below and can be seen in the attached picture.

1 - The channel properties don't seem to be showing up in the file browser view, yet they do show up in the data portal view.  I'm assuming my plugin is working considering the data portal view is correct.  The channel group properties show up correctly in both places.  This issue will prohibit me from filtering my data with channel properties.

2 - The channel preview window is including the "nodata" points.  Is there any way to have the channel preview window ignore the "nodata" points, as the plot viewer does?  Or is there a way to trim the data in my plugin so this doesn't occur?  I have channels of varying length within each channel group, which is leading to some channels having many "nodata" points.

Thanks

[Brad_Turpin]

Hi AnthonyC,

I'm astonished at your screenshot.  Not only do you have suspicously few channel properties in the file browser in the NAVIGATOR, but the properties you do have are out of their normal order in the property table.  Weird.  Does this happen on all computers or just a few?

Would you be able to send me a few data files and your DataPlugin for me to take a closer look at this?  If you prefer, you could email them directly to brad.turpin@ni.com.

There's no way in DIAdem 11.1 or earlier to change the display behaviour of the preview window in the NAVIGATOR.  It is certainly possible to trim NoValues inside the DataPlugin, but depending on how your DataPlugin is written that might come at the cost of loading and indexing performance.

Brad Turpin

DIAdem Product Support Engineer
National Instruments

[Brad_Turpin]

Hi again AnthonyC,

I'm no longer astonished.  I looked at the right side of your screenshot and discovered that the only properties that are present in the Data Portal that are missing in the NAVIGATOR are properties that DIAdem calculates at load time.  What properties are you interested in filtering or searching on?  It may be easy enough to add those properties in your Data Plugin.

Brad Turpin

DIAdem Product Support Engineer
National Instruments

[AnthonyC]

Hi Brad,

Thanks for your response.  I was not aware that the properties that DIAdem calculates are calculated at run time.  Why do the Maximum and Minimum properties show up at all in the file browser view if they will never be valid?  I'm only interested in searching on the maximum and minimum property at this point.

I sent you my plugin and an example data file for question 2.

Thanks Brad   

[Brad_Turpin]

Hi Anthony,

I agree that this is confusing, but I can explain how it happened and the perspective from which it actually makes sense.  When NI first introduced the TDM data schema back in DIAdem 9.0, we wanted to make the transition from the previous DIAdem file format (DAT) as easy as possible.  The old DAT file format had a static list of File and Channel properties, so we matched those static properties in the TDM schema.  TDM has "base model" properties that are gauranteed to always exist, such as File.Name and Group.Description and Channel.Minimum, but it also has user-defined "custom" properties that only exist if they are created by the customer, usually in a DataPlugin.  This is why the base model properties display by default in the NAVIGATOR property table, even if the DataPlugin has not created them.

In your case you just need to explicitly create a Channel.Minimum and Channel.Maximum property inside the DataPlugin, and then those property values will display correctly in the NAVIGATOR property table.

Brad Turpin

DIAdem Product Support Engineer
National Instruments