Migrating from Cumulus 1 to MX: Difference between revisions

Migrating from Cumulus 1 to MX (view source)

Revision as of 08:37, 23 March 2021

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 ===Compatibility for Data Log files===
-*Steve Loft designed MX so that in general it was able to read [[Category:Log Files|Data Log files]] created by the original Cumulus.
+When Steve Loft designed his original Cumulus (1), he had no experience to draw upon as to the best way to treat items like dates. He wrote the software originally just for his own benefit and did not need to worry about time zones. Subsequently as he enhanced his software to make it usable by others, he faced many issues on how to cope with different time zones, and different weather stations having different sensors. In Cumulus 1, he basically focussed on compatibility by keeping to his original design for the data log files (both those ending in '''.ini''' and those ending in '''.txt''', and only adding extra fields to the end.
+When Steve Loft took a new look at the data log files for Cumulus 2, he started with a new design, the principal change was that he decided to use UTC for all fields in them that reference dates and times. Steve struggled with Cumulus 2 largely because he was (at that time) not familiar with the C# language he was later to use for MX. It is fair to say that using UTC was also a major factor in his failure to get Cumulus 2 to provide the functionality he had offered in the original Cumulus.
+When Steve Loft designed Cumulus MX, he was able to learn from his experiences with both Cumulus 1 and Cumulus 2, and he decided to use dates to an ISO specification (ISO 8601 Data elements and interchange formats – Information interchange – Representation of dates and times), but in the local time zone of the particular user, and therefore log files are not [https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15167 backwards compatible].  However those MX beta builds were designed to be forward compatible in that all date formats used by Cumulus 1 could be read, although MX would when rewriting any date change them to the new format.
+After Mark Crossley took over development of MX, he initially retained much of the code created by Steve Loft. However after his release of version 3.5.4, he simplified much of the core code, and for dates in the data log files this means that MX can no longer read any dates that are not in the format used by the locale used for running MX. In an important example, this implies that while [[Dayfile.txt]] for Cumulus 1 could use any (non-space) character to separate the different parts of the date in the first field (and times in many other fields), MX now can only accept the character defined for separating parts of a date in the locale  (and only accept ":" for time separator).
+Key summary points (apply to MX beta and early MX releases up to version 3.5.4):
+*Steve Loft designed MX beta so that in general it was able to read [[Category:Log Files|Data Log files]] created by the original (legacy) Cumulus.
 **See individual articles (accessed from that link) for more details on such differences.
 **'''Please note, most of the information for MX here is taken from notes by Steve Loft, and so it applies to MX 3.0.0.'''
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 *When the MX software needs to update a particular entry (e.g. an extreme) in a particular file, it will subsequently save the file and change the content for the affected line to the new format.
 *Consequently, within a single file both formats will co-exist, you may see lines using Cumulus 1 format for the extremes that have existed for a while, and Cumulus MX format for any new extremes.
 ===Update as at MX release 3.7.0===