File menu

The File menu has two items:

• Open File (Ctrl+O): opens the file whose path has been specified in the File Path control on the Data File page.

• File Information (Ctrl-Shift-I): this menu is inactive at this time.

• Quit (Ctrl+Q): quits ALiX and its dependent windows.

Detailed description:

1. Open File

Its action is identical to pressing the Load File button (with a blue recycling icon) located to the right of the File Path control:

There are two ways to specify a file path:

1. Using the Browse button (the button with a folder icon) to the right of the path control

2. Dragging and dropping a file into the File Path control

If the Preview File Information checkbox is not checked, selecting a new file will automatically open it and load its data in memory. This is fine if all data selection parameters are appropriate for that file, but may result in the wrong data to be loaded otherwise.

In the other case, illustrated on the figure above, if the checkbox is checked, selecting a new File Path will only load basic information about the file, such as the number of photons in each channel, macrotime clock value, etc., the specifics depending on the file type.

Note for .spc files: the only way to obtain preview information on the number of channel data stored in the file is to sample part of the file. In some cases, spurious counts are generated and recorded by the Becker & Hickl card, resulting in an additional dummy channel with very few counts. This is sometimes not detected during the sampling (preview) step, and can result in the selection made by the user after preview (for instance select the first channel as donor and the second as acceptor) to not correspond to the final list of channels (for instance if the dummy channel turns out to be the first channel in the list, it will become the "donor" channel when reading the complete file).

In this case, it is necessary to adjust the channel definition after the first loading and reload the file.

2. File Information

For file formats which contain additional information or metadata (namely photon-HDF5 files), a separate window can be opened to check this information.

3. Quit

Some independent windows (such as the Notebook or the Histogram Analysis window) will remain opened and will need to be closed separately.

This action can also be performed by clicking on the Close Window button at the top right of the window.

In both cases, a confirmation dialog will pop-up in case of an inadvertent action.