## Able Inspectors

An Inspector is a window used for viewing the state of an Able agent or Able bean during the development process. Inspectors allow you to select data members for viewing and then to choose the text or graphic format of the display.

To use an inspector, you perform the following steps:

1. Open an inspector on an agent or bean.
2. Select the data you want to view.
3. Select the view of the data to present, including an option to refresh the view on demand.
4. Set options for the view, both the view properties and the view refresh rate.

Custom inspectors can be provided to display specialized views of either Able beans or beans that you provide.

### Open an Inspector on an Agent or Bean

To open an Inspector window, you must select the Inspect option from the object context menu. To open the context menu, move the cursor over the icon in the Agent canvas or over whitespace in the Agent canvas for the container Agent itself, and click the right mouse button. A pop up context menu will appear with the options available for that object. Select the Inspect item and an Inspector window will open.

### Select the Data you want to view

To select the data you want to view, go to the Data pulldown menu. Select either Parameters or Arrays.

Parameters
  You may select one or more parameters to view in the Inspector. Parameters are any properties (data members) which the Bean has surfaced through its BeanInfo class. You may set the number of data points which will allow a view such as a line graph to plot the value over time.
Arrays
  You may select one or more arrays to view in the Inspector. Arrays are any indexed properties (such as Vectors, arrays of elementary data types such as String[] or double[]. All elements of the selected arrays will be displayed.

### Select the view of the data

To select the view, go to the View pulldown menu and choose from:

Text
  Text display of the parameter or array selected.
Text Series
  Text display of n values of the parameter or array selected. Caches the number of values
Text Statistics
  Computes statistics for selected data. For example, if predicting a value, select 2 data points such as outputbuffer[0] and outputbuffer[1], which are the calculated and target network values. Set the number of points to cache to, say 100. When you press the "Text statistics" view, it goes through the sets of 100 points and computes the min/mean/max, variance and R2 (ratio of variances), and percent error.
Text Trace
  Displays bean level trace output. The trace level is set on the bean's General property page.
Area chart
Area chart, stacking
Bar chart
Bar chart, stacking
Line chart
Scatter plot
Time plot

Some beans can provide custom inspectors. For example, neural network beans provide a network graphic inspector. Self-organizing map beans provide a cluster diagram.