Table of Contents
There are many utilities available to read, browse, write, and use NeXus data files. Some are provided by the NeXus technical group while others are provided by the community. Still, other tools listed here can read or write one of the low-level file formats used by NeXus (HDF4, HDF5, or XML).
Most of these utility programs are run from the command line. It will be noted if a program provides a graphical user interface (GUI). Short descriptions are provided here with links to further information, as available.
nxbrowsenxconvertnxdir
NXdir is a utility for querying a NeXus file about its contents. Full
documentation can be found by running this command:
nxdir -h
nxingest
nxingest extracts the metadata
from a NeXus file to create an
XML file according to a mapping file.
The mapping file defines the structure (names and hierarchy) and content (from either the NeXus file, the mapping file or the current time) of the output file. See the man page for a description of the mapping file.
This tool uses the NAPI. Thus, any of the supported formats (HDF4, HDF5 and XML) can be read.
nxsummary
Use nxsummary to generate summary of a NeXus file.
This program relies heavily on a configuration file. Each item tag
in the file describes a node to print from the NeXus file. The path
attribute describes where in the NeXus file to get information from. The
label attributes is what will be printed when showing the value of the
specified field. The optional operation attribute provides for certain
operations to be performed on the data before printing out the result.
See the source code documentation for more details.
nxtranslate
nxtranslate is an anything to NeXus converter. This is accomplished by
using translation files and a plugin style of architecture where
nxtranslate can read from new formats as plugins become available. The
documentation for nxtranslate describes its usage by three types of
individuals:
| the person using existing translation files to create NeXus files |
| the person creating translation files |
the person writing new Retrievers |
All of these concepts are discussed in detail in the documentation provided with the source code.
nxvalidate
From the source code documentation: “Utility to convert a NeXus
file into HDF4/HDF5/XML/...” Note: this command-line tool is
different than the newer Java GUI program: NXvalidate.
nxvalidate
Java program (in development in 2010) to check
any NeXus data file for conformance with the NeXus
NXDL-based standard. Note: This Java GUI is different than the command-line
tool: nxvalidate.
NXdump
NXdump is temporary wrapper script for .libs/NXdump in the
NeXus code repository. From the source code documentation: “ The NXdump program
cannot be directly executed until all the libtool libraries that it depends on are
installed. This wrapper script should never be moved out of the build directory. If
it is, it will not operate correctly. ”
NXplot
An extendable utility for plotting any NeXus file.
NXplot is
an Eclipse-based GUI project in Java to plot data in NeXus files. (The project was
started at the first NeXus Code Camp in 2009.)