20051116: Point data served by opendap catalogs

>From: Stuart Wier <address@hidden>
>Organization: UNAVCO
>Keywords: 200511161643.jAGGhU7s005770

Hi Stu-
>
>Thanks for taking care of the point data plotted with depth item. And yes the 
> labeling
>matter was in my .xml resources file.

Okay.

>Here is a puzzle that may have something to do with online catalogs. For point
>  
>earthquake data the GEON IDV recognizes .nc files ending in _eq.nc and calls 
>NetcdfPointDataSourceGEON, like the IDV  _metar.nc and _buoy.nc files handled 
> by 
>NetcdfMetarDataSource.

What is the exact pattern you are using?

>When served by a catalog such as http://geon.unavco.org/unavco/catalog.xml (ea
> rthquake 
>data is in the catalog under category "Earthquake Locations and Focal Mechanis
> m Data") 
>the _eq part of the filename is seemingly lost so that the GEON IDV does not r
> ecognize 
>point data. Is that caused by serving through a catalog? Do you see the same t
> hing with 
>_metar files of METAR data served by an opendap catalog?

The IDV does not support reading of point data files through OPeNDAP.
Only gridded data can be served up through OPeNDAP at this point.
That's not the problem here, but any solution needs to take this
into account.

The reason you are getting what you are getting is because
catalogs are processed a bit differently than files. Since there is 
no dataType listed for these files in the catalog, it looks up the type in
the datasource.xml file based on the URL pattern.
The default pattern ends up matching the one for NetCDF.Grid

I think the easiest solution would be to add in a new entry to
your datasource.xml which would have id="HTTP.POINT" and then
have the rest of the entry look the one you have for the local
GEON files.  Then, in your catalog, add:

<serviceType>HTTP</serviceType>
<dataType>Point</dataType>

for your metadata tag.  You'll need to define a service type
for netCDF which would be the HTTP base for these files.

Don
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