There may be a need for binning the values as a typical observation of 40ks will either produce many pages or too many points per page to be useful if the number of columns requested is more than about 20. For now, the user may select a start and end row, frame or time and plot only subintervals of a file. It's not clear that binning is practical because the algorithm would be complex for GTIs. It may be useful to run a separate task like evselect to bin the data BEFORE running hkauxplot.
Pgplot currently creates it's own y-axis scales. This may cause viewing problems for large (multiple orders of magnitude) scales. Thus, it may be necessary to allow for logarithmic plots, but this may prove impractical because adding a parameter for all columns axis scale is cumbersome, and an automated solution (e.g. if more than 2 orders of magnitude) may have unintended results, especially for negative numbers.
While this task supports plotting EPIC and OM housekeeping and auxiliary files, it is not currently requested that they do so. Should this functionality be requested, this task can be expanded to accomodate these files in more than just a general case.
At some point the OAL 'long and short column name converter' may be incorporated. This allows users to use more familiar (and easy to remember and understand) proxy values for the the non-explicit column names (e.g. E1290) in the HK files.
There is some ambiguity in plotting first and last rows for an AUX file. This is due to there being nrows in the file, but only a fraction of the rows are for each CCD (approximately evenly distributed among the number of CCDs in the instrument). If selecting startrow and stoprow parameter values, one should be careful to select only the rows for a selected CCD, not ALL rows (e.g. an RGS AUX file has 900 rows total, but each CCD contributes only 100 rows each (for the 9 RGS CCDs), so if one selects startrow=1 and stoprow=800, it's not clear if they want 8/9ths of the rows of the selected CCD plotted or they want the FRAMES of the selected CCD that occur before row 800. Due to the large number of rows typical in AUX files (100000+), row selection may be vital (especially given the large number of actual COLUMNS available), so this issue will be address shortly.
The main purpose of this program is to produce the PPS summary data products. As such, care should be taken to ensure that data is presented in a manner which is most useful to the user. When multiple pages are necessary to display all the data, the range of the x-axis and the GTI strip should be identical for all plots, so that the data can easily be compared between plots.
