We need a way for firefly to tell us where the fits file is even when not using a callback

[tony-johnson]

For example, if we just want to average all pixels in the image without selecting an area.

[tgoldina]

We are planning to provide you the whole plot state, which includes the reference to the currently displayed image, zoom and rotation info, etc. Indeed, we don't have a way to get right now using our JS API. (You can get file location from the callback data on area, line, or point selection, but not on mouse readouts and region selection.)

Meanwhile, the workaround is to provide a file in the the location Firefly is allowed to access. This way Firefly will not copy the file.

I am copying a message on this subject I've sent Dingcheng on October 30th, 2015:

Just to make sure we are on the same page…
I have downloaded the latest fftools-exec.war from the latest Firefly releases at https://github.com/lsst/firefly/releases into a fftools-test directory.
In the same directory I have created config directory. Under it I have fftools directory, and under fftools I have app.prop:

• fftools-test
  • fftools-exec.war
  • fits
    • E000_RAFT_R01.fits
      ....
  • config
    • fftools
      • app.prop

In the app.prop you put the Firefly properties you'd like to override.

In my case, I override two properties:

more fftools-test/config/fftools/app.prop
python.exe= /Users/tatianag/dev/miniconda/bin/python /Users/tatianag/dev/pynotebooks/myTestLauncher.py
visualize.fits.search.path=/Users/tatianag/dev/fftools-test/fits

The first now tells which python executable to use and which python file to run. The contents of myTestLauncher.py are similar to SamplePythonLauncher in Firefly github. I define my Python tasks there.

The second one tells Firefly which directory is OK to read Fits files from, so that I could pass FITS file path rather than URL to Firefly image viewer:

        var iv= firefly.makeImageViewer('plot');
        iv.plot({
            "Title"  : "First RAFT Image'",
            "File"    : "/Users/tatianag/dev/fftools-test/fits/E000_RAFT_R01.fits"
        });

This way Firefly does not need to download the file, it will simply use it to calculate png tiles.

I start standalone firefly server with the following command:

java -Xms1g -Xmx4g -jar fftools-exec.war -Dserver_config_dir=./config -DcontextReloadable=true -httpPort 8000

(I don't want to use the default port 8080, because I have my dev Tomcat running there. You could probably use the default.)

Notice how I pass the config directory. I also set the option to hot reload firefly files, so that when I drop a test.html into fftools-test/.extract/webapps/fftools/, I can immediately access it via http://localhost:8000/fftools/test.html