Use same window for autoplotting

[nulinspiratie]

I've found the "Auto-plot new" feature of Plottr quite useful because it allows me to always view the currently active measurement.
However, it is currently programmed such that every new measurement opens a new window, and also doesn't close the previous window. This can create an excessive amount of windows, especially when executing several measurements in quick succession.

I propose the option to have a dedicated window for auto-plotting. Whenever a new measurement is started, it will clear contents of that window, and replace it with the contents of the new dataset. It could for example be enabled by a second checkbox as such:

Edit: It looks like uploading an image doesn't work. The example showed a second checkbox with text "Same window" below the "Auto-plot new" checkbox

I wanted to see how others feel about this, and if others agree it would be a good addition, what a good strategy is to implement this.
Looking over the code, I think the best strategy would be to have an attribute QCodesDBInspector._autoplot_window which could point towards a dedicated autoplot window. Further, AutoPlotMainWindow should have a method to clear it's contents and to load new contents.

[astafan8]

Sound useful to me :) i think it's worth creating a PR with the implementation

Looking over the code, I think the best strategy would be to have an attribute QCodesDBInspector._autoplot_window which could point towards a dedicated autoplot window. Further, AutoPlotMainWindow should have a method to clear it's contents and to load new contents.

sounds correct to me. i think it will be more obvious with a PR opened, also other maintainers/reviewers can chip in

[wpfff]

This is an excellent suggestion!
I've been thinking about this as well for the live plotting functionality. I like the idea of having a dedicated live plot window, but still be able to open others manually on demand.

As a note on that:
I would maybe want to propose to have a single mechanism for managing autoplot windows that works similarly for both inspectr and monitr.
The way the two handle things is not quite the same at the moment. See: https://github.com/toolsforexperiments/plottr/blob/master/plottr/apps/monitr.py

there i've recently implemented running each autoplot window in a dedicated process (which makes things a lot faster/more responsive for us).

Me and one of my students are starting to do some work on monitr, and we could include work on this feature with that. I will likely have some time after the semester ends (in about a week) to put some work into this.

[nulinspiratie]

Glad to hear this feature could be an addition to Plottr! If there is a part of this that I can help out with please let me know.

@wpfff I hadn't yet noticed that inspectr and monitr were two different classes. Is monitr continuously checking for new/updated datasets, and it then refreshes plottr and optionally auto-plots the new data sets?

[wpfff]

i'll think about what a good implementation would look like, and get back to you here.

monitr is kind of a sibling of inspectr, but with a different data backend. my lab, for instance, prefers hdf5 based data storage over sqlite. so we're not using the qcodes dataset, but a simple wrapper around hdf5 that stores each measurement in a separate file (similar to older versions of qcodes or qtlab. it comes with plottr, in plottr.data.datadict_storage). monitr is the (currently very primitive) tool that we use to list the data in the working folder.