XMM-Newton Science Analysis System: User Guide

7.1.1 Configuration file

Apart from the products described in § 7.1.2, a default configuration file is produced that allows the tool to be rerun with exactly the same configuration. A copy can be made to be modified with a text editor in order to customise the performance.

In order to use a customised configuration file, the task is called with:

xmmextractor paramfile=myconfig.xml >& screenoutput.log

An example of a default configuration file is given in figure 53. The first block, $<$OBSERVATION$>$, contains performance setup in the format: $<$PARAM id="analysisoption" default="0:all"/$>$, where the parameter name is given in quotes behind id= and the parameter value in quotes behind default=. The first parameter, analysisoption, determines which level of products are to be extracted. The default, 0:all, indicates that the full analysis is performed. Other options allow extraction of only events files, only spectra or light curves, etc. All options are explained in the package description of xmmextractor. The remaining parameters are self-explanatory. The data reduction can be turned off for each instrument by changing $<$default="yes"/$>$ to $<$default="no"/$>$ behind the corresponding instrument for which no data analysis is desired.

The remaining blocks contain configuration information for each available instrument and are named $<$INSTRUMENT value="...."/$>$, where the name of the instrument is given in quotes. Within each instrument block, a separate block is present for each exposure, where the mode, exposure id, exposure time, and a flag whether or not this exposure is to be processed are given. Replacing $<$process="yes"/$>$ to $<$process="no"/$>$ means that the exposure is not processed. For each exposure, the products that the tool can produce are listed in blocks within which the task setup can be modified. Again, each yes can be replaced by no if not wanted. Parameter names and values can be modified. Not all details can be given here and can be found in the respective documentation for each task.

Figure 53: Example of a configuration file in xml format.

A default configuration file can also be created without running xmmextractor, using the command

odfParamCreator outputFileName=myconfig.xml

Note that the commands cifbuild and odfingest need to be run as part of the SAS setup before odfParamCreator can be used. For details, please see the description of the task odfParamCreator.