Matthew Marquissee, working in NASA GSFC Code 632 in Summer 2003, developed a "Space Physics Dataset Browser" to search NASA datasets stored on various independent servers. Managed by Robert.M.Candey@nasa.gov The files include: 00readme.txt (this text) Marquissee_report.doc (Microsoft Word report) finaltechnotes.txt (Matt's notes) datasetbrowser.py (GUI Python interface to browse for files) dataseteditor.py (GUI editor tool for maintaining XML dataset descriptions) datasetfinder.py (main Python engine for finding files) datasitewalk.py ftpwalk.py (routines for walking an FTP site) spdeDialogs.py (dialog windows used by GUI tools)) strptime.py (time routines by Brett Cannon, modified by Marquissee) timeRange.py (time routines) treedisplay.py (GUI tree display routines) cdaweb.xml (sample dataset descriptions in XML) nssdcftp.xml (") pwgdata.xml (") This code requires Python 2.3 , PyXML 0.8.3 PyTix 8.1.4 (for tree viewer) FTPutil 1.93 <> On Windows, you may need to copy the tix8184.dll into Python23/DLLs and replace the current Python23/tcl/tix8.1 directory. Mysterious Bug: Turning on the hourglass cursor causes browser window to flash until it is redrawn. It was working, but now I had to comment out the recursion in the BusyManager in charge. CURRENT TO DO LIST: Support for VMS FTP and HTTP Add CDF master fields to XML Add tree interface to browse datasets Comment treedisplay more Add content to help dialog boxes in spdeDialogs Add hourglass (remove Retrieval Complete) (was done until Mysterious Bug) Select multiple datasets at once (min/max of times) Allow selecting multiple URLs and getting all at once Change to Wx GUI? The following is a test case for the Finder part: #!/usr/local/bin/python # Added third-party libraries: # ftputil 1.1.3 (copied 'ftputil.py' into lib path) # PyXML 0.8.3 (installed according to documentation) import datasetfinder dataSet = 'ace_epm_k0' tStart = '1997-08-31' tEnd = '1997-09-09' doc = datasetfinder.load_xml('cdaweb.xml') flist = datasetfinder.search_xml(doc, dataSet, tStart, tEnd) print flist