Table Interfaces

MIDAS has a very extensively developed table  data structure system that is useful for handling data derived from various applications and can be used as a general analysis tool. This chapter describes the subroutine calls which interface to tables and which an application program needs to read from or to write to a MIDAS table.

The names of these routines consist of six letters (capital letters), where the first two characters are either TB  for FORTRAN 77 or TC  for the C language. The next character indicates a table object as indicated below, and the final three letters describe the action of the routine.

The table objects, defining the third letter are:

• A for operations on a table array ;
• T for opening and closing a table file;
• C for operations on a table column ;
• E for operations on a table element ;
• R for operations on a table row ;
• I to get general table information;
• F for the column format ;
• L for the column label ;
• U for the column unit ;
• S for the column selections ;
• K for reference column .

Standard operations on Tables are:

• initialization of the table data, either by creating a new table or by opening an existing table;
• element and row access;
• sorting and searching;
• editing of the table descriptor ;
• handling of selection column .

The following sections give a general description of the different Table interface routines. The detailed calling sequences are included in appendix A. A program example showing how to use the routines described in this section is given in Appendix A.2 of this document.

Information about using Tables from the MIDAS command language is included in the ``MIDAS User's Guide'' [4] Chapter 3.