Visualization Creation Methods

Visualizations can be created either automatically or manually. The following sections discuss automatic and manual creation methods.

Creating Visualizations Automatically

IDL provides several ways to create visualizations; from the Workbench, from the command line, and from iTools. Visualizations can be created automatically in the following ways:

From the Workbench Visualize Perspective—Open a file containing data variables using File → Open File. The variables appear in the Variables View. You can then drag one or more variables onto a Visualization tool. This drag-and-drop method is a quick way to visualize data variables. For instructions on this method, see Visualize Perspective in the IDL Workbench Guide.

The rest of this chapter deals with these other ways of visualizing data:

From the IDL Command Line—Specify some data when creating an iTool at the command line. For example:

myPlotData = RANDOMU(seed, 30) iPlot, myPlotData

These statements will create a new data item in the iTool Data Manager and create a new iPlot tool that visualizes the data in a line plot.

From an iTool—Open a file in an existing iTool, either by selecting File → Open or using the Data Import Wizard (File → Import...).

Note
When a file is opened from an iTool, the data is available in the iTool Data Manager, but does not appear in the IDL Workbench Variables View.

From the Workbench Menu—By using the Data Import Wizard (File → Import...) to import a variable from the IDL Session.

Both the Data Import Wizard and the process of using File → Open are described in detail in Importing and Exporting Data.

Note
Certain data types (such as binary or ASCII) may require you to supply IDL with further information before they can be visualized. For more information about reading certain data types into iTools, see Importing Data from a File.