pydata/pandas — pull request #1930 by jreback (2012-09-18 17:40:13+00:00)
Title:     FDPanel object, a 4 dimensional pandas container (version 2)

FDPanel is like a Panel object, but provides 4 dimensions: labels, items, major_axis, minor_axis

instead of using a dict of Panels to hold data, the FDPanel provides a convenient represenation in pandas space
with named dimensions to allow easy axis swapping and slicing

see examples/4D Example 2.pdf for creation and usage

motivation
----------
io/pytables currently provides a nice representation of a table to store a Panel object
directly (assume item x major (dates) x minor)
FDPanel allows many named tables to represent a collection of these tables in a single hdf5 file

testing
-------
tests/test_fdpanel.py provides a similar methodology to test_panel.py

FDPanel is completely self contained (in core/fdpanel.py), with the exception of a single change that was needed in core/indexing.py (regarding multi indexing)

all tests that are not skipped pass

much of the code changes now occur in panel.py; fdpanel.py is a thin wrapper over an n-dim panel like obj

.join works but merge testing code not complete yet