Table

Tables are the basical metadata system in Dynamo. They are just matrices that describe the properties of sets of particles. The property coded on each column is fixed.

A table can be seen as the metadata of a given data folder. The first column in a table is just an integer number (which we call a tag) that identifies a particle. In the data folder, this particle is identified by the name of the file that contains it, i.e.

<MyFolder>/particle_00003.em

As they are matrices, Matlab tools (like find,plot,hist) are easily customizable to explore and visualize the contents of a table. Additionally, Dynamo includes many specific utilities. dapropos table will give you a list of basic commands that you can use for table manipulation.

Format convention in a table

The convention can be consulted each time by the command dthelp

Reading and writing tables

Tables are customarily stored as text files with extension '.tbl'.

Tables can be read and write into the matlab worspace with the standard commands dwrite and dread.

For specially long tables, you can use the extension '.tbl', which will write the files in binary formays

Visualization of tables

Basic info dinfo

dinfo table just plots on screen a summary of the contents of the table on each column.

Command line dtplot

dtplot allows the creation of graphs like: positions of particles in a volume, orientations, distributions of orientations. One example of use of the command is to check if all the particles in a reference (column = 34) have a similar missing wedge orientation (the tilt angle is coded in column 8).

Basic plots dtshow

dtshow \l table \g opens a lightweight GUI that allows quick plotting of the contents of the table, and also a GUI access to all the plotting options of dtplot

Complex plots dtview

dtview is a more complicated browser for table contents.

Table manipulation

Creating tables

An easy way to create a blank table compatible with a given data folder is dynamo_table_blank.

Selection of parts of a table

Use dtgrep. It's applicability ranges from just selecting an explicitely defined range of particle tags to the computation of particles pointing in a direction.

Conversion tools for other software packages

dapropos compatibility<\tt> will print a selection of functions that can be used to import and export particle metadata with the format expected by other packages, as AV3, jsubtomo and XMIPP