What's New in IDL 8.7

New Features
Updates
Library Updates
See Also

For links to What's New information for other IDL 8.x releases, go to See Also.

New Features

ROUTINE_DIR Function

You can use the new ROUTINE_DIR function to get the fully-qualified path to the calling routine, without the filename. This is useful when you want to open up a data file that lives alongside your code.

Asynchronous Job Classes

The IDLAsync classes allow you to specify units of work to execute asynchronously outside the main IDL session. For a more detailed description, see IDL Asynchronous Jobs.

IDLAsyncBridgeJob: Represents a unit of work to be done at some point in the future inside an IDL_IDLBridge.
IDLAsyncBridgeTaskJob: Allows the user to specify a single IDLTask that will executed inside an IDL_IDLBridge.
IDLAsyncJob: Represents a unit of work to be done at some point in the future.
IDLAsyncJoin: Observes one or more IDLAsyncJob objects to know when they are done.
IDLAsyncQueue: Manages a collection of IDLAsyncJob objects that are to be executed at some point in the future.
IDLAsyncSpawnJob: Represents a unit of work to be done at some point in the future by spawning an external process to perform the work.
IDLAsyncSpawnTaskJob: Allows the user to specify a single IDLTask that will executed by the TaskEngine.
IDLTaskJob: Provides an interface for any job that wants to run an IDLTask.

Updates

GOES-16 Example

A new example has been added to the Images Gallery. The example shows how to read and display GOES-16 (GOES-R) data on a map projection.

JOURNAL ALL Keyword

The JOURNAL procedure has a new ALL keyword, which forces all informational messages (such as compile output and save/restore output) to be saved to the journal file.

WIDGET_DRAW Scroll Events

On Windows, you can now set VIEWPORT_EVENTS=2 on WIDGET_DRAW to have the draw widget continuously send events as the scroll bar is moved. This behavior was always true on Motif.

IDLTask Schema Update

A revision key was added to all task files, so that users can keep track of task definition changes between versions. Because of this update to the task template, the task schema key is now idltask_1.1.

Library Updates

None

Product	IDL

Version	9.0