CIAO 4.0 Beta 3 Release Notes

The CIAO 4.0 Beta 3 features a beta of the new Sherpa, the CIAO modeling and fitting package. Details and documentation on the new system are available from the Sherpa website.

Several bug fixes and enhancements to the CIAO Data Model and the ChIPS plotting package are also included.

• How CIAO 4.0 Beta 3 Affects Your Analysis
• Tools
• Data Model
• ChIPS
• Documentation

How CIAO 4.0 Beta 3 Affects Your Analysis

Tools

Data Model

Bug Fixes

• Corrected problems transforming a vector of arrays. This had been listed on the dmcopy and dmlist bug pages.

Transform Library

• Three new commands have been added to the Transform library:

  • copy_transform
  • apply_transform
  • get_transform_type

ChIPS

Bug Fixes and General Enhancements

• The set_contour command would fail when passed a valid slang list or array.

• The unused plot.aspect and log.minimum entries were removed from the .chips.rc file. A warning is printed at startup is an old version of .chips.rc containing these entries is detected.

• The print_window command now supports relative paths that begin with a subdirectory (e.g. "images/my_plot") in addition to those that begin with "./" or "../".

• If tick mark at the limit of an axis range happened to coincide with the computed ra/dec conversion for the end major tick mark, the minor tick marks above the upper or below the lower major tick might not get displayed. This has been fixed.

• The get_window_title command correctly returns the value of the window title.

• The ability to specify a plot id in an add_curve, add_contour, or add_histogram call has been added. This applies only when a plot does not exist prior to the child element being created. In each of these commands, the title of the plot is specified:

  % S-Lang
  add_curve(x,y,"plot.title.label=\"sampleplot\" axis.x.label=\"time(sec)\"");
  
  # Python
  add_contour([2,3,1,4],2,2,['plot.title.label','"2 \\rho plot"'])
  

• In the Beta 2 release, undoing a deletion of an object resulted in the object being placed at the front of its depth instead of at its original position. This fix resets the undone deleted object to its order in the depth prior to the delete.

Error Handling

• Error messages have been made more consistent and provide more informative feedback to the user. Cases where one command returned multiple errors have been made less verbose.

Documentation

Sherpa Website

• There is a new website dedicated to the Beta 3 version of the Sherpa package: http://cxc.harvard.edu/sherpabeta.

Ahelp

• Sixty new ahelp files for ChIPS have been added to the CIAO documentation.

Analysis Threads

• There are no changes to the CIAO Science Threads for this release.