CIFBuild

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Changes in SAS 5.3.0

Starting wth SAS 5.3.0, the way cifbuild works has changed slighly. You can read the details by following this link. In practice this means that you cannot safely use a version of cifbuild earlier that 4.1 with CCF constituents issued after 2002-04-15.

Using with SAS 5.2.0

You may not want to upgrade your SAS installation, or you may want to run both SAS version 5.2.0 and 5.3.0.

You can use cifbuild (either 5.2.0 or 5.3.0) to create a cif that is valid for SAS 5.2.0 by setting the parameter analysisdate to be earlier than 2002-04-15T00:00:00.

You can use cifbuild in SAS 5.3.0 with analysisdate=now to create a cif that may work with SAS 5.2.0. If any of the CCF constituents in this cif cannot be used by SAS 5.2.0 you will get a clear error message saying that the algorithm identifier for a certain CCF constituent is not known. This of course may happen after a few hours of computation.

Using cifbuild

With the following form you can interact with the SAS task cifbuild. Only two parameters of that task are of relevance here: the observation date and the analysis date. Both have the following format: yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss. The string now is also a valid date.

The observation date is available in sereval places, one of these is in the ODF constituent rrrr_oooooooooo_SCX00000SUM.ASC. For example:

OBSERVATION
0092970701 / Observation/Slew Identifier
0269 / Revolution number
2001-05-29T17:16:58 / Scheduled Start Time   <-- Use this date
2001-05-29T20:47:05 / Scheduled Stop Time

The analysis date will in general be now, but can also be any other date. You should read the documentation of the task cifbuild for more details.

---

Observation date: [yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss]
Analysis date: [yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss]
Note: do not enter an analysis date earlier than 2000-12-01, as the calibration database is known not to be complete before then. This condition is not yet checked for in the form.

Options

1. Allow me to download the CIF:
   This will create a CIF based on the two dates above. You'll be allowed to ftp the resulting CIF to your machine.
   
   
2. Prepare a script to ftp all the CCF constituents:
   This will generate a (Unix/Linux) shell script with which you can download via ftp all the CCF constituents in the CIF. You must copy the script from the browser into a file, edit the password field, make that file executable, and run it in the directory where you want to download the CCF constituents.
   
   
3. Compare with my CIF:
   • My CIF is:
   
   This will compare a CIF you upload with the CIF generated above. You'll then be able to download the CCF constituents that are not in your CIF, but only if you ahve also selected one of the download options above.
   
   
4. Allow me to download the individual CCF constituents:
   This will generate a list of ftp links to the individual CCF constituents.

Problems ?

Questions regarding the CCF should be addressed to the XMM-Newton Helpdesk.