Controlling the Amount of Output

It is not always necessary for the output from astWriteastWrite (§15.3) to be human-readable, so a ChannelChannel has attributes that allow the amount of detail in the output to be controlled.

The first of these is the integer attribute FullFull, which controls the extent to which optional, commented out, output lines are produced. By default, Full is zero, and this results in the standard style of output (§15.8) where default values that may be helpful to humans are included. To suppress these optional lines, Full should be set to $-$1. This is most conveniently done when the Channel is created, so that:


\begin{terminalv}
channel = astChannel( NULL, NULL, ''Full=-1'' );
(void) astWrite( channel, skyframe );
channel = astAnnul( channel );
\end{terminalv}

would result in output containing only the essential information, such as:


\begin{terminalv}
Begin SkyFrame  ...

In contrast, setting Full to $+$1 will result in additional output lines which will reveal every last detail of the ObjectObject's construction. Often this will be rather more than you want, especially for more complex Objects, but it can sometimes help when debugging programs. This is how a SkyFrameSkyFrame appears at this level of detail:


\begin{terminalv}
Begin SkyFrame  ...