Log book functionality on the reflectometry GUI

[gemmaguest]

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Overview

Users often fail to update their log books because this is a somewhat time consuming manual process We would like to provide an easy way for users to quickly collate the relevant information about the runs in their experiment and record notes against them.

Currently the ISIS Reflectometry GUI allows adding a simple comment in the experiment search results box. Scientists have noticed that users are much more likely to use this to record comments about their experiments than an external log book because it is immediately available in a GUI they are actively using anyway (usually during their experiment) with all of the required information pre-populated. Additionally, runs can also be excluded and a reason noted for excluding them.

Any information stored here is saved and reloaded when you save/load the GUI settings via the Batch menu. This batch file can already be used to some extent as a very simplistic log book. However, it can only be viewed in the reflectometry GUI in Mantid. We would therefore like the ability to save the contents of the search results box to another file format, e.g. CSV. I think this initial step could be done quite easily.

We may also wish to add additional features such as more columns e.g. to keep notes of which other runs a run was stitched with. The search results box was never envisaged to be used as a log book so it would be good to consider the implications of making the functionality any more complicated, and whether the UX or underlying design could do with any rework before implementing further reaching changes.

Notes

• Is there a limit on the comment length?
• What output format is best? Initially probably simple CSV would be fine, although it should probably also contain additional information such as the instrument, experiment number and cycle. This could perhaps be saved in a header similar to the save ascii functionality.
• It would be good to improve the way the functionality to exclude runs works. Currently if any text is entered in the Exclude column the row is marked as invalid and it is excluded. This is not that intuitive though (especially if you end up with whitespace in the box!). It would be better to have a tick box and only show/enable the exclude-reason text entry field if it is marked as excluded. This is somewhat more complex though and may not be worth the effort.
• Could this be useful to other techniques? Is anyone else doing anything similar? Could it be worth extracting this to a mantid widget?

[gemmaguest]

Putting in the icebox for v6.4 because it should be a quick win and would be really useful (to implement a simple export as csv at least)