• The IDV knows very little about everything. All of the things that make up an application are defined by a set of resources. This includes:
  • The user interface skins, menu bar, toolbar.
  • The data choosers, what data sources are available, formulas and derived quantities.
  • What displays are available and the the display resources: color tables, station models, display conventions, etc.
  • ...
• The resources are defined at startup time by the idv.resourcefiles property. This points to a list of "rbi" files:

  idv.resourcefiles=%USERPATH%/idv.rbi;%SITEPATH%/idv.rbi;%APPPATH%/idv.rbi;%IDVPATH%/idv.rbi

• By default the IDV looks in the USERPATH, SITEPATH, APPPATH and the IDVPATH for the RBI files and loads them in that order.
• Let's go look at the system idv.rbi file in ucar/unidata/idv/resources/idv.rbi
  • The RBI is made up of a number of resources tags, each one defines where the IDV can find the resources files for that particular resource. e.g., by default the xml files that define the color tables are found in:

      <resources name="idv.resource.colortables">
        <resource location="%USERPATH%/colortables.xml"/>
        <resource location="%SITEPATH%/colortables.xml"/>
        <resource location="%APPPATH%/colortables.xml"/>
        <resource location="%IDVPATH%/colortables.xml"/>
      </resources>
    

  • The resource locations can point to different things, not just xml files. It just so happens that most of the resource files are defined using xml.
• In a later section we'll see how to control what resources get loaded when using the "loadmore=false" attribute.
• Let's look at the resources in more detail.
  • Run the ExampleIdv with the argument -listresources to see the list of resources and which ones exist.
  • The X'ed red ones are those that don't exist. The green ones exist.
  • The pattern is used for recognizing resources in a plugin.
  • Note, the paths can be a Java resource, a file or a url. The IDV handles all of these transparently.
  • Let's create a couple of things - a new color table, a new station model and a new formula.
  • Shut down and restart with -listresources again.
• Let's look at the local IDV storage directory.
  • cd to ~/.unidata/idv/DefaultIdv
  • This directory holds everything created by the user in the ExampleIdv. Its name comes from idv.store.name property.
  • Note, there should be colortables.xml, stationmodels.xml and derived.xml files there. These hold the resources you created previously.
  • These can be used in a site path or within a plugin.

Unidata IDV Workshop for version 5.7 > Java Developer Topics > IDV Startup