XDSGUI

XDSgui is a GUI (graphical user interface) for XDS that is supposed to help both novice and experienced users. It graphically displays the ASCII and cbf files that XDS writes, and can run useful shell commands with a simple mouse click. The design goal of the program is to enable XDS data processing without the commandline, and to supply additional graphical information, in a simple, user-modifiable and user-extensible way.

How to use the GUI

The program may be used to analyze graphically any existing directory with files earlier written by XDS, or may be used to create these files. It should be started in a terminal window which will show the output of the programs that are run (xds, pointless, xdsconv, ...).

The user is supposed to use the tabs on the top, from left to right. Thus, one starts with the choice of the processing directory ("Projects" tab), goes to the "Frame" tab to display a raw dataframe, or a .cbf file written by XDS, or a .pck file written by XDSSTAT. Within the "Frame" tab, XDS.INP may be generated. Then, untrusted (shaded) areas may be marked with the mouse which will write the appropriate lines to XDS.INP, ORGX ORGY may be corrected if necessary, and the INCLUDE_RESOLUTION_RANGE, EXCLUDE_RESOLUTION_RANGE and TRUSTED_REGION adjusted as required. The latter operations are interactive in the sense that the user modifies the values in XDS.INP, and then checks the result in the Frame tab. In other words, the user moves back and forth between the Frame and the XDS.INP tab.

After finally moving to the XDS.INP tab, XDS may be run by clicking a button. The resulting output files from XDS will then be displayed in the next tabs.

After finishing this first round of processing, the TOOLS tab may be used, which - among other things - offers those three options that I found most useful to optimize the data processing. After choosing (by mouse click) one of these three options, the user should go back to the XDS.INP tab, specify JOBS=DEFPIX INTEGRATE CORRECT, and run XDS again. Ideally, each of the three options should be tried separately, and its effect should be compared with the previous processing to verify that it really improved the processed data - use ISa to decide whether the processing has improved! Those options that improve ISa can then be used in combination.

After CORRECT, the data may be analyzed with XDSSTAT and the resulting XDS_ASCII.HKL may be converted to e.g. MTZ, using the XDSCONV tab.

Tabs

The main window of XDSgui has the following sub-windows organized as tabs:

Projects

stores names of directories which contain files from XDS processing. If none of these is selected, the current directory is used. A new directory may be created. The list of project directories is saved to ~/.xds-gui .

Frame

to display existing 2-dimensional data frames, or to start XDS data processing by displaying a raw data frame. In the latter case, the "generate XDS.INP" button runs the generate_XDS.INP script for the raw data frame that is being displayed. The blue circles correspond to the areas of the detector that are within TRUSTED_REGION; the green circles correspond to INCLUDE_RESOLUTION_RANGE, and the red hatched regions correspond to EXCLUDE_RESOLUTION_RANGEs. The locations of the circles are not as accurate as those that XDS uses internally, because a simplified formula (and only values from XDS.INP, not the refined ones from XPARM.XDS) is used to calculate the resolution; this e.g. does not take care of detector swingout or otherwise skew geometry.

Untrusted areas can be specified by the user, using two (UNTRUSTED_ELLIPSE; UNTRUSTED_RECTANGLE) or four (UNTRUSTED QUADRILATERAL) right mouse clicks. The resulting areas are shown with red outline, and the keyword/parameter pairs are shown in the XDS.INP tab.

XDS.INP

this shows the current XDS.INP file. Coloured items correspond to the circles of the FRAME tab. Changes can be made with the simple editor, and the new version can be saved. A run of xds_par can be started (and killed).
The XDS.INP tab is directly connected with the FRAME tab; changing a value in the XDS.INP tab results in immediate change in the FRAME tab. This means that e.g. an UNTRUSTED area that was positioned wrongly can be edited or simply removed in the XDS.INP tab.

DEFPIX

each tab shows its .LP file, respectively.

INTEGRATE

shows INTEGRATE.LP on the left side. During the INTEGRATE step, the temporary files are displayed. On the right side, plots of the tabular quantities given for each frame, or for each batch of data are shown. For the refined quantities, only the changes are plotted. THE SIGMAB (beam divergence E.S.D.) and SIGMAR (mosaicity) plots show these quantities estimated from each frame (blue), refined for each batch (green) and averaged over the whole dataset (red horizontal line).
The border between the left and right side of the window may be adjusted with the mouse.

CORRECT

shows CORRECT.LP on the left, and plots of tabular quantities on the right. The upper line in the I/sigma (unmerged data) plot gives [math]\displaystyle{ {I/Sigma(I)}^{asymptotic} }[/math] ([Diederichs, Acta Cryst. (2010). D66, 733-740 http://dx.doi.org/10.1107/S0907444910014836]). The three lines in the Chi^2 plot are the Chi^2 values obtained during scaling, for the ABSORP, MODPIX and DECAY corrections, respectively.
In the lower plots, the colored lines correspond to the nine resolution shells for which values are found in the tables.
The border between the left and right side of the window may be adjusted with the mouse.

TOOLS

offers possibilities for running short scripts.

Several such scripts are pre-defined; the user may create her own scripts. If scripts are modified, they are saved to ~/.xds-gui . The names of the buttons (e.g. "User defined command 1") can be changed by editing ~/.xds-gui .

• The first item of the left panel ("Show frame with predicted spots") generates the predicted pattern of reflections for a user-specified frame, overlaid on the frame, for display with XDS-viewer. The file FRAME.cbf (produced by INTEGRATE) is renamed to FRAME_$X.cbf (where X is the user-specified frame number) and remains in the temp subdirectory. It may of course be opened in the FRAME tab, but starting XDS-viewer automatically has the advantage that several frames with predictions may be inspected on the screen, at the same time. Please note: if the XDS directory resides in a FAT32 filesystem (which is often the case on a USB stick or disk), then "ln -s" should be replaced by "cp -p" since FAT32 does not support symlinks. Also note: for the script to work correctly, NAME_TEMPLATE_OF_DATA_FRAMES in XDS.INP has to specify an absolute, not a relative path.

• The second item ("Optimizing data quality") offers commands that manipulate XDS.INP in several ways. Please note: the popup "XDS.INP has been changed externally" is emitted by the Qt system and cannot be switched off. It appears if one of the scripts changes XDS.INP while it is opened by XDS-gui (which is always the case) . Thus, one should simply press the "Reload" button. The user-definable commandline may be used e.g. for

grep -v "JOB=" XDS.INP > x; echo "JOB= DEFPIX INTEGRATE CORRECT" > XDS.INP; cat x >> XDS.INP

• The third item ("Saving and comparing good results") offers commands to save/restore the current data processing files to/from a "save" directory. Make sure to replace "xdiff" with "xxdiff" or "tkdiff", if one of the latter is available.

• The last item ("Further analyses") may be used for commands, e.g. running pointless against the XDS_ASCII.HKL file. The user-definable commandline may be used e.g. for

phenix.xtriage XDS_ASCII.HKL

XDSSTAT

This tab allows to run XDSSTAT with a mouseclick. As soon as XDSSTAT.LP exists, the main plots derived from it are displayed. Another button allows to run XDS-viewer to visualize the control images that XDSSTAT generates, namely anom.pck, scales.pck, rf.pck, misfits.pck, corr.pck, rlps.pck, peaks.pck and nobs.pck .

XDSCONV

a simple XDSCONV.INP is provided by default. It may be edited by the user, and saved. Upon clicking a button, xdsconv is run and if necessary a MTZ file is produced. XDSCONV.LP may be displayed.

Availability

The program is under development and probably has bugs. If it crashes, it should simply be restarted. A crash of the program does not interfere with the operation of XDS.

The current version of the program can be downloaded, by academic users, from [1] (Linux 64bit), [2] (Linux 32bit), or [3] (Mac OSX 10.7). Industrial users of XDS: pls contact me directly.

Dependencies

XDSgui depends on generate_XDS.INP, XDS-viewer, and of course xds_par, xds, and xdsconv. The XDSSTAT tab requires xdsstat. One of the items in the TOOLS tab calls a graphical file comparison program; if the default (xdiff) is not available, xxdiff or tkdiff may be used - please adjust the commandline below the button accordingly.

Technically, the word "dependency" means that these scripts/programs should be in your $PATH - an 'alias' is often not good enough because the TOOLS commands use bash as a shell, and that shell does not inherit the aliases from e.g. (t)csh.

Installation

In case of Linux, the binary may be copied into e.g. the directory /usr/local/bin by the administrator, or to $HOME/bin by the user. Any other directory should be good as long as it is in your $PATH.

In case of a Mac, the DMG file may be installed in the usual way, by double-clicking it and dragging the icon into the Applications folder. It is advantageous to place a symbolic link, like

ln -s /Applications/xds-gui.app/Contents/MacOS/xds-gui /usr/local/bin/xds-gui

and to start the GUI from a terminal window, by typing xds-gui .

Known bugs, problems and workarounds

1. Question concerning TOOLS: "Show frame..." on Mac: it creates everything shown in the commandline but it seem to us that everything runs in the background. Therefore xds-viewer does not open anywhere as it is not seen. Also, it would be great if this image together with the predictions would be re-directed to the FRAME tab.
   Answer: On Linux, the xds-viewer window is brought to the foreground automatically, whereas on the Mac this does not seem to happen. However, an icon for xds-viewer appears in the dock (on the right) and I can double-click it to see the xds-viewer window. I have no idea how to bring xds-viewer to the foreground automatically, and I need input from people who know Macs and tell me how to do it (on the commandline!). The reason why we do not open automatically in the FRAME tab is that one can have several xds-viewer windows open at the same time, and compare the patterns. As a workaround, you can manually open the resulting temp/FRAME_$X.cbf in the FRAME tab.
2. Another question concerning TOOLS: "Further analyses" on Mac: again pointless runs nicely but there is no output for the user.
   Answer: Could it be that you started xds-gui by double-clicking its icon in the Finder? In that case, there is no output visible, because there is no console. Unfortunately, for all the Tools, the output is in the console window where xds-gui was started. We will try to find out how to open a window where the output is then shown. Thus, currently the workaround for this problem is to start xds-gui in a console window.
3. generate_XDS.INP does not seem to like spaces in file/directory names. While frame names rarely have a space in them, directories might, e.g. if an external disk has the label "John's USB disk" then this would be mounted on Linux as /media/John's USB disk/ and that would result in a error message from generate_XDS.INP . The workaround is to use a symlink on a different harddisk.

If you find a bug, please send email to Kay dot Diederichs at uni-konstanz dot de , ideally with enough information/data to reproduce the bug.

News

program updated May 22, May 28, June 5.