To aid in naming files or directories for retrieving or saving data, many I/O providers and other tools in the program use file masks or templates so that, for example, a single template specification could be used to write several TINs to the file system. There are several flags that can be used for the template. All flags start and end with the percent '%' sign and act as placeholder for the actual starting or ending date of the TIN and the sequence number. Below is a reference to the supported flags. File masks and naming templates
Flag
Description
%s:<dateformat>%
Specifies the start date of the TIN to be operated on. The <dateformat> can be any valid Java Date format string. For example the string %s:ddMMMyyyy_HHmm% would perhaps translate to 01Jan2016_0408. An in depth discussion of Java date formats can be found at https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html
%<dateformat>% or <%e:<dateformat>%
Specifies the ending data of the TIN. The 'e:' is optional for the ending date. The ending date works exactly the same as the starting date defined above.
%durfmt1%
This will determine the largest integral time unit to display the time in. For example a TIN that has a 24 hour duration will result in a duration string of '1DAY'. The durations will either be in units of DAY(S), HR(S), MIN(S), SEC(S), or MS.
%durfmt2%
This will print the duration in a format supported by the W3C XML Schema 1.0 Specification. For example the string P5Y2M10DT15H represents a period of five years, two months, 10 days, and 15 hours.
%nnn%
This is a sequence number. If 72 TINs are to be written they would have sequence numbers 1 through 72. The number of 'n' characters denotes the width of the string. For example %nnnn% would return sequence numbers 0001, 0002…0072. %n% would return 1, 2…72.
%t%
This is a placeholder for the TEMP file directory. It is replaced with the temporary directory location defined for the system being used.
Note that many of the I/O providers support templates that have varying directory names as well as file names. For example, given a set of 1-HR duration output TINs that cover the timespan 30Dec2015 0000 through 03Jan2016 2400, the following template: C:/MyRadarFiles/%yyyy%/%MMM%/%dd%/%yyyyMMdd-HHmm% would create the appropriate directories and put 24 hourly TIN files in each one. The files would be named: