Re: [Plastic-devs] Passing VOEvents via Plastic

[Mark T. <m.b...@br...>]

On Tue, 25 Apr 2006, Alasdair Allan wrote:

> > Do you have particular applications in mind for this?  I'm not  
> > really up on what's what in VOEvent.
> 
> Well obviously I'm someone will implement a VOEvent aware display  
> tool (before I have to sit down and do it), e.g.
> 
> >> ...so that a Plastic aware display tool could for instance parse  
> >> the  message and plot the data products, e.g. a finding chart with  
> >> the event RA&Dec marked along with an appropriate error circle  
> >> taken from the message

That's a reasonable thing for a VOEvent-specific tool to do, but
if what you want to achieve by sending a handleEvent message is to 
mark a region on the sky, this might be better done by a sky-display
tool such as Aladin, or a catalogue-display tool like TOPCAT, or 
some other generic application.  You'll have a better chance of 
interoperating with these tools if you send some non-VOEvent-specific
message along the lines of ivo://votech.org/sky/pointAtCoords.
So you might want to consider firing a pointAtCoords event at the
same time as firing a handleEvent.

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b...@br... +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/