Spool Visualisation

[andreas-wuestefeld]

A spool is a great source of information. Notably for data-availability and acquisition parameters.

Spool.viz... returns currently a "not implemented" type of error

I suggest to implement basic plotting of data evolution. Two parameters should be straight forward

1. Show data-gaps (i.e. instrument downtime); This assumes that all manufacturers have their own characteristic file duration. Not sure if Sintella ProtoBuf is possible, but that can be seen later

2. Sampling rate: See if and when acquisition parameters were changed.

Furthermore, adding gaugelength to the spool would allow to also plot that parameter evolution.

Here is a vizualisation of a recent dataset (boring for sampling rate, but you should get the idea)

Questions:
Is this considered useful by others?
Where would be a logical place to put such code?

[d-chambers]

Hi @andreas-wuestefeld,

I think these could be quite useful. All of the visualizations would be based on the dataframe of the spool contents (created with Spool.get_contents()), so it should be quite straightforward to make a single function that plots how a selected attr (or multiple attrs) varies with time.

For plotting gaps, I have been meaning to add a get_gap_df (or something similar) method to the spool for awhile. There is a similar function in ObsPlus so it should be straight-forward to adapt. However, I would prefer the spool method remain light-weight, and the dataframe wrangling bits go in uitls/pd.py, it's the place for misc pandas code. In pd.py you might define get_gaps_from_df, then Spool.get_gap_df can just call get_contents and pass that to `get_gaps_df`` and return.

The tests for these functions would go in the corresponding test files, (tests/test_utils/test_pd.py and tests/test_core/test_spool). In each case, make a new test class named after the function name.

For the visualizations, I think making a viz/spool.py module would be a good option.
The Patch.viz name space is just a patch namespace. To make a spool namespace you can just define it like the PatchVizNamespace and add a similar entry point in pyproject.toml.