The previous section on Setting up Plot Types shows the preparation stage of creating plots. In this section, we describe the steps for generating plots and the contents in the plots.
You can plot the selected data by any one of the following methods:
Select Plot Results from the context menu, obtained by right clicking on any of the data column in the Result View.
Select Plot Results from the Run toolbar.
Select Plot Results from the pull-down menu: Action>Plot Results.
Selected data will be plotted in a Plot Results Dialog. In the current version of SansGUI, you can have one interactive Plot Results Dialog per Project Model.
Plotting results is not limited to the end of a simulation run. When there are logged attributes, and some of them are selected for plotting, the Plot Results button is activated. You can click on it before a simulation run, during the simulation run, when the simulation is paused, or after the simulation is ended. When the Plot Results Dialog is displayed, SansGUI will update the plot when there are new data coming out from the simulator. Therefore, you need to decide whether you would leave the Plot Results Dialog opened or closed during a simulation run for performance reasons. Other notes regarding dynamic charting follow:
You can click on the Plot Results button and customize the chart before starting a simulation.
The Y-axis can be set to auto-scaling or fixed maximum/minimum, using the Customization Dialog... from the right-click context menu.
Although you can perform customization while the simulation is running, it is a good idea to pause the simulation, do customization, and then resume the simulation.
Strip charting is also possible. The width of the plot frame, which is the number of data points to be plotted along the X-axis, is governed by the Maximum Number of Rows in the Result Views parameter (default 1000) that you can set by selecting Tools>Options... from the pull-down menu. Please note that this is a document dependent option, meaning that the change is local to a Project Model.
The Plot Results dialog is a pop-up window created for plotting the results. It contains the following elements initially:
Main Title: to identify the Project Model.
Sub-Title: to indicate the date and time the plot is generated.
X-Axis: with axis label, tic marks, and legends for X labels or X data.
Y-Axis: with axis label, tic marks, and legends for Y data.
Data Curves: in line chart format with different line patterns and colors, if multiple.
The Plot Results dialog can be resized, maximized, or minimized just as others in the Windows environment. The plot will be resized according to the enclosing window size. Enlarging the dialog will increase the legibility of the plot. You can close the dialog by using the Cancel button (marked with an x at the upper right corner of the window) or select Close from the pull-down menu, obtained by clicking on the SansGUI icon at the upper left corner of the dialog.
You can zoom into a rectangular portion of a plot to display a subset of the data. To do so, click on one corner of the desired rectangle and, while without releasing the mouse button, drag the bounding box to the other corner as you needed. Releasing the mouse button will cause the plot to be refreshed with the selected area being redrawn to fill the whole plot. Because the number of data points have been reduced, there is a scroll bar at the bottom of the dialog for you to scroll through the data set. You can perform multiple zoom-in operations if you wish.
When you need to reset the chart to the original view, simply right click on the chart and select Undo Zoom from the context menu.
The data plot can be printed out to a printer by using the Export Dialog. The Export Dialog can be obtained from the context menu of the Plot Results dialog. Inside the Export Dialog, select MetaFile as the Export format and Printer for the Export Destination. Click on the Print... button to send the plot to the designated printer.
From the Export Dialog, you can export the plot to the Windows clipboard in the metafile or bitmap format, or a separate file in the metafile (WMF), bitmap (BMP), or JPEG (JPG) format. You can also export plotting data in the text format to the Windows clipboard or a separate file. Select the format, the destination, and the size as needed and click on the Export button to export it.
The next section Customizing Plots describes how to change the properties of the plot to suit your needs.
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SansGUI Modeling and Simulation Environment Version 1.2
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