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 of 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. If empty, the directory containing the project file is the home folder
database	database directory. Default: "database"
lip	directory containing the binary LIP files. Default: "lip"
output	default path for the output database(s). Default: "output"

For compatibilty reasons, also settings for default paths for "temp", "log", "script", and "init" are possible. It is, however, recommended to use relative paths for all other 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"
database	"db"
output	"c:\temp"

The following filenames would be produced:

(in the context of input database)
"species_param.sqlite"	"e:\projects\projectA\db\species_param.sqlite"
"take_two/sp.sqlite"	"e:\projects\projectA\db\take_two\sp.sqlite"
(in the context of outputs)
"outputdb.sqlite"	"c:\temp\outputdb.sqlite"