3 Introduction

This section presents a set of recipes for performing common operations using DX.

• The first recipe (Section 4) introduces the basic operation of the DX visual programming editor. You should follow this example to learn the minimum basics of using DX.
• The second and third examples (Sections 5 and 6 respectively) describe how to prepare gridded and particle data for input to DX. Before an external data file can be imported into DX you must prepare a header file describing it. These recipes describe this process.
• The remaining recipes present simple networks for performing common types of visualisations. Though simple, the networks are complete and self-contained; they include all the steps that are necessary to perform the visualisation. In these cases, in a sense, the network is the recipe.

3.1 Copies of the recipe networks

Copies of the recipe networks, data files, example programs and other files referred to in this section can be found on Starlink systems in directory:

and on non-Starlink systems in directory:

The most convenient way to access these files is probably to copy them into your current directory before attempting to read them or load them into DX. The examples in subsequent sections assume that copies of the files are available in your current directory.

3.2 Further examples

The IBM Manual QuickStart Guide[1] provided with DX contains numerous further example networks and an extensive discussion of importing data files into DX. All the example networks described in the QuickStart Guide are included with the release of DX.