Next Previous Up Contents
Next: Tool Interoperability
Up: Activation Actions
Previous: Activation Actions

### 8.1 Activation Functions

When defining custom activation actions in the Activation Window, you enter an expression to be invoked on a row when it is activated. This expression uses the syntax defined in Section 7 and can make use of the functions listed in Appendix B.1. However in this case there is an additional list of functions you can use which cause something to happen (for instance displaying an image) rather than just returning a value. The following classes of functions are available:

Browsers
  Displays URLs in web browsers.
Mgc
  Specialist functions for use with data from the the Millennium Galaxy Survey.
System
  Executes commands on the local operating system. These are executed as if typed in from the shell, or command line.
Sdss
  Specialist display functions for use with the Sloane Digital Sky Server.
SuperCosmos
  Specialist display functions for use with the SuperCOSMOS survey. These functions display cutout images from the various archives hosted at the SuperCOSMOS Sky Surveys (http://www-wfau.roe.ac.uk/sss/). In most cases these cover the whole of the southern sky.
BasicImageDisplay
  Functions for display of graphics-format images in a no-frills viewing window (an `ImageWindow`). Supported image formats include GIF, JPEG, PNG and FITS, which may be compressed.
TwoQZ
  Specialist functions for use with data from the the 2QZ survey. Spectral data are taken directly from the 2QZ web site at http://www.2dfquasar.org/.
Image
  Functions for display of images in a window. Supported image formats include GIF, JPEG, PNG and FITS, which may be compressed. The SoG program (http://www.starlink.ac.uk/sog/) will be used if it is available, otherwise a no-frills image viewer will be used instead.
Output
  Functions for simple logging output.
Sog
  Functions for display of images in external viewer SOG (http://www.starlink.ac.uk/sog/).

A listing of the functions in these classes is given in Appendix B.2, and complete documentation on them is available within TOPCAT from the Available Functions Window.

Next Previous Up Contents
Next: Tool Interoperability
Up: Activation Actions
Previous: Activation Actions

TOPCAT - Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables
Starlink User Note253
TOPCAT web page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
Author email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk
Mailing list: topcat-user@bristol.ac.uk