Open sjperkins opened 1 year ago
I had had a similar thought and I am all for it. This would likely be a breaking change, but I think it would be worth it. It means that we can abandon MS-like syntax in xds_{to,from}_table
(i.e. don't introduce a MAIN table for no reason) and remove the unintuitive double colon syntax that it necessitated. This functionality can be retained/added in xds_{to,from}_ms
to make it "equivalent" with MS access via python-casacore
. I think that xds_{to,from}_table
should be sufficient for all other use-cases.
In #272, @caseyjlaw tried to use
xds_from_ms
to open a sub-table of the MS. This didn't work becausexds_from_ms
adds some default values (grouping and indexing columns) for opening the MAIN table of an MS. Due to this, we currently usexds_from_table
to access sub-tables in our applications.However, it occurs to me that @caseyjlaw was trying to do the most obvious thing, given the affordance. It could be that split is unnecessary and confusing and that
xds_{from,to}_ms
should be the interface for dealing with all Measurement Set-like datastores (CASA/zarr/parquet), as well as their sub-tables.Then,
xds_{from,to}_table
can be used for general undefined table types, and we could definexds_{from,to}_xxx
methods to handle somexxx
specification (calibration methods for example).Any opinions on this @JSKenyon, @landmanbester, @o-smirnov ?