Using Recursive ENVIRaster Definitions in ESE 5.2

Back in August, I blogged about how to subset ENVIRaster objects before passing them into ENVITask using the desktop ENVI API.  Today I'm going to talk about how to do this for an ENVITask published on ESE.  While there is some pretty useful help documentation, I wanted to present a couple more examples that showed how the recursive capabilities of the ENVIRaster definition can be leveraged.

As the help docs detail, there are three flavors of JSON objects that can describe an ENVIRaster object.  In all cases the "factory" attribute is the primary means of identifying which JSON object is being used and what its other attributes can/must be.  Careful inspection of the JSON syntax in the help will show correlation to functions in our desktop API: URLRaster matches ENVI::OpenRaster(), SubsetRaster matches ENVISubsetRaster() and ResampleRaster matches ENVIResampleRaster().

 

As this table shows, the keywords in the desktop API functions match the JSON attribute names exactly (with one notable exception of "format" which was made more user friendly for ESE to handle the native formats, ENVI Classic formats, and custom formats internally).

There is also a direct correlation between the value of the "factory" attribute and the API function - the attribute value strips off the "ENVI" prefix from the API function name.  Again there is the exception of URLRaster, but this is a special value to signify the end of recursion and to represent the use of the class method on the ENVI object.

The positional arguments used by the API functions are also standardized to a degree, for URLRaster we use the attribute name "url" to correlate to the URI positional argument in ENVI::OpenRaster.  This discrepancy can be ascribed to the backwards compatibility with ESE 5.1 and the original use of ESRI's GPRasterData datatype in that version.  For the other two factory modes, we use the standardized attribute name "input_raster" since that is common to all of the virtual rasters as a positional argument.

Armed with this insight, we can thusly convert the following desktop API code into a JSON equivalent for use in an ESE task:

nv = ENVI(/Headless)

oRaster = nv.OpenRaster('qb_boulder_msi')

oSubRaster = ENVISubsetRaster(oRaster, SUB_RECT=[256, 256, 767, 767])

oResRaster = ENVIResampleRaster(oSubRaster, DIMENSIONS=[1024, 1024])

 

{

  "factory" : "ResampleRaster",

  "dimensions" : [ 1024, 1024 ],

  "input_raster" : {

    "factory" : "SubsetRaster",

    "sub_rect" : [ 256, 256, 767, 767 ],

    "input_raster" : {

      "factory" : URLRaster",

      "url" : "qb_boulder_msi"

    }

  }

}

 

I replaced the standard IDL Workbench chromacoding with individual colors for each API function name, argument, and keyword, and then used the same color for the corresponding JSON attribute to illustrate how easy this can be.  One important thing to notice here is that due to the recursion of the JSON, and the depth-first way it will be traversed, the order of attributes in the JSON is the opposite of the order of the function calls made using the API.

So the next question you will likely be asking is "can I do this with any of the virtual raster functions?" and the answer is most likely.  While we haven't formally tested all the permutations of virtual raster functions, we have learned enough here to figure out how to build JSON representations for most of the virtual raster functions by mapping their keywords to attribute names and the positional argument source raster to the "input_raster" attribute for recursion.  An intrepid ESE user can experiment with this concept , which should work though I will make no guarantees here.  For example, here is an example I tested to create an NDVI raster out of a spatial subset:

 

nv = ENVI(/Headless)

oRaster = nv.OpenRaster('qb_boulder_msi')

oSubRaster = ENVISubsetRaster(oRaster, SUB_RECT=[256, 256, 767, 767])

oNDVIRaster = ENVISpectralIndexRaster(oSubRaster, INDEX='NDVI')

 

{

  "factory" : "SpectralIndexRaster",

  "index" : "NDVI",

  "input_raster" : {

    "factory" : "SubsetRaster",

    "sub_rect" : [ 256, 256, 767, 767 ],

    "input_raster" : {

      "factory" : URLRaster",

      "url" : "qb_boulder_msi"

    }

  }

}