One rather annoying and often recurring task in the life of a modeller is the need to handle a large amount of files and to maintain paths and file locations in different init- and input-files. Here, iLand tries to reduce the pain a little by providing a way to specify default locations and, generally, by operating with relative paths.
Default locations
Default paths for different types of files are defined in the section system.path in the project file.
Generally, all paths might be given either as absolute or as relative. If relative paths are provided, then they are considered to be relative to the home directory of the project. If the home project setting is empty, the location of the project.xml itself will be used as the the home-directory.
The following table describes the various file types:
| key | description |
| home | the project's home directory. |
| database | database directory. |
| lip | directory containing the binary LIP files |
| temp | temporary directory (unused) |
| script | default directory for scripts (e.g. for management) |
| output | default path for the output database(s) |
| init | base path for tree initialization files |
Rules
Whenever a file is specified, following rules apply:
- if the filename is absolute (i.e. starts with a drive letter), nothing happens. Thus one can always override default locations.
- if a relative filename is specified (that starts with a directory or filename), then, depending on the context, the filename is expanded to the respective default directory.
Some examples (using Windows file notations):
If given the following values for default directories:
| home | "e:\projects\projectA" |
| init | "initfiles" |
| output | "c:\temp" |
The following filenames would be produced:
| (in the context of file inits): | |
| "init_a.csv" | "e:\projects\projectA\initfiles\init_a.csv" |
| "take_two/init_b.csv" | "e:\projects\projectA\initfiles\take_two\init_a.csv" |
| (in the context of outputs) | |
| "outputdb.sqlite" | "c:\temp\outputdb.sqlite" |
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