Re: [Plastic-devs] Select or show colums message

[R H. <ric...@co...>]

I like it too ...

On Thu, 20 Jul 2006, Mark Taylor wrote:

> On Thu, 20 Jul 2006, John Taylor wrote:
>
>> Thinking again about this, I have an idea that might allow us to combine
>> the increased "pluggability" of having a generic message with the
>> control implied by a more specific one and thus keep both you and
>> Richard happy.
>>

... but this would be too much :) , since we still have the problem of 
sending classifications. I propose an extra:

//pass classes all at once
selectCols( id, { cols[], class_labels[] } )

or:

  //pass classes one at time
selectCols#new_subset( id, { cols[], class_label } )

so each observation could have a classification to be represented, for 
example, by different groups/colours in topcat. The alternative (from my 
point of view) is for Eirik to write another table with an extra column 
and pass that. This has several ramifications, not least being the 
generation of mutiple temporary files and duplication of effort (Eirik 
can't write tables at present, and I'm not really sure it should).

Without such a well-defined class label, it's going to be difficult to 
represent multiple clusters and subsets successfully, something Eirik 
should (coming soon ;) be doing a lot of.

Richard