Welcome back to AWIPS Tips!
Today we’re going back to CAVE and look at the purpose of different pane displays. The Unidata distribution of CAVE is defaulted to the 1-Pane layout which looks like this:
Some people might be familiar with the 5-Pane layout, which is the default layout with the National Weather Service's version of CAVE, and it looks like this:
To switch between the displays, use the View menu at the top of the toolbar:
Panes, Panels, Tabs, and Editors, Oh My!
It is important to go over a couple quick definitions with different user interface components in CAVE. We’re focusing mostly on panes in this blog (below in red) which are referring to the 4 panes on the left hand side of the application and the main big pane. In the 1-Pane, there actually are no additional panes on the left-hand side, and in the 5-pane there are four panes on the left-hand side. Any of the side panes can be swapped out with the main pane.
Multiple tabs (green) can be loaded into the main pane while the editor (blue) is the active tab that you are loading products into. The main pane can consist of multiple tabs, but when “swapped” (set into the left-hand side view) only the currently active tab will be swapped.
One more similar concept is that of panels (yellow). Some datasets open into a non-standard panel view, such as 2-panel or 4-panel. This is where there are multiple views within one tab. Each panel can have different datasets, but the mouse cursor is linked across all the panels. So, as you zoom, pan, or sample in one panel, it mirrors those actions in the other panels. These are often found with radar datasets.
5-Pane Capabilities
The 5-pane view is very powerful and can be used to set up many different displays. Different datasets, different scales, and different tabs can all be contained on each one of the panes. Switching between panes can be done easily by the right-click-hold menu, or simply single right-clicking on the pane of interest. See the short animation below for a quick demonstration on how to use the panes.
One final note about the 5-pane view: once you have all the scales, resources, and tabs loaded the way you like them, you can save it as a display (either locally or on the EDEX server) and return to it easily at any time.
We hope you learned something new about panes in CAVE. Check back in two weeks for the next blog post, where we walk through how to add new shapefiles to the maps menu with EDEX.
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This blog was posted in reference to v18.2.1-6 of NSF Unidata AWIPS
