See the table on pages 18-20 of the HiPS standard (linked to this ticket) for the full list of attributes in the HiPS properties file.

The following parameters from the standard HiPS properties header would be most useful to have immediately visible in the HiPS-selection list:

• obs_title (text, field needs to be fairly wide)
• obs_regime (text, a single word)
• hips_release_date (an ISO-8601 date)
• hips_frame (text, a single word)
• hips_order (a one or two digit integer)
• hips_pixel_scale (if available; a float in units of degrees)
• moc_sky_fraction (a floating point number, dimensionless)

Since Firefly cannot currently display anything other than HiPS image maps, I believe, the list should be limited to ones with dataproduct_type not equal to “cube” or “catalog” (I say it this way because we need to accept both the correct “image” and the case where dataproduct_type is not provided at all).

A side note: if we currently do not handle any coordinate frames other than equatorial and galactic (is that true?), we need to document that and say that coordinate readouts for HiPS maps in other frames may be misleading. What do we currently do with them? Treat them as if they were equatorial?

Fallbacks:

In the cases where the modern style of properties content is not available (such as for the current release of the GLIMPSE map), the following document may be helpful in figuring out the correct fallbacks:

https://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/hips/hipsdoc.pdf

See the table at the end of Section 6.1, starting with the row with id and publisher_id.

firefly supports cubes not catalogs.

Please don't use the "hipsdoc.pdf" link above for anything else.  It is not the HiPS standard as finally agreed.

Although it is not mentioned in "hipsdoc.pdf", the old label keyword can be used as a fallback for hips_title.

yes, we are already doing that in the title, but it needs to be in the table as well

I haven't tried a cube yet. I'll do that after my current (1-2) meeting.

Cool, I browsed some cubes successfully.

So, given that we do support cubes, then there are additional fields that would be very useful in the selection dialog.

I would like to suggest that we consider having the dialog offer a UI element that allows optional restriction to specific types of maps (i.e., specific values of dataproduct_type) and which, when selected, modifies the selection dialog to add additional columns. For cubes, this means at a minimum supporting hips_cube_depth (which is a mandatory parameter in properties for cubes) and data_cube_bunit3.

I thought that I'd put the following suggestion on a ticket somewhere already, but I can't find it now.

I would like to suggest that we add, to the HIPS-map-selection table, columns for hips_cube_depth ("Cube Depth") and data_cube_bunit3 ("Cube variable"), that we fill them when those properties are present, and that we disable their display by default (i.e., have the initial state of the column-selector dialog have them unchecked). Then someone interested in cubes can turn them back on manually.

This is not required for the May release.

Another ticket DM-14158 will address the extra columns for cube data. 

Suggestion has bee made and implemented.