Webtags/Parameters (preserving history): Difference between revisions
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In the position in the file where Cumulus is to insert the relevant data, place a web tag in the '''general format''' specified here: <pre><#tag_name [optional input parameters][optional output parameters]></pre> | In the position in the file where Cumulus is to insert the relevant data, place a web tag in the '''general format''' specified here: <pre><#tag_name [optional input parameters] [optional output parameters]></pre> | ||
==== Case sensitivity for tag names ==== | ==== Case sensitivity for tag names ==== |
Revision as of 00:55, 8 April 2021
Introduction
What is a web tag?
Put simply, a web tag is included in a Cumulus template file to indicate where Cumulus should insert values when it processes that template and produces an output file. A Cumulus Template File is the name given by Steve Loft to any files that contain web tags, and need to be processed before they actually include values.
The output file can be:
- a web page,
- a JavaScript Object Notation (.json) file
- a JavaScript file,
- a PHP script file, or
- a eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) file.
General Format for Web Tags
In the position in the file where Cumulus is to insert the relevant data, place a web tag in the general format specified here:
<#tag_name [optional input parameters] [optional output parameters]>
Case sensitivity for tag names
The tag_name in the general format above is case sensitive, so please type the tag name exactly as shown in the web tag columns in the tables on the [Webtags|web tags page]].
What is a web tag parameter?
The parameters shown in the general format above are of two kinds:
- Input modifying
- Output modifying
These are explained below, after the warning on case sensitivity.
Case sensitivity for parameters
The optional input parameters always use lower case, so please type them exactly as shown in the sections dealing with input parameters on this page.
The optional output parameters are case insensitive when used in Cumulus 1. But for Cumulus 2 and later, so this includes MX, the output parameters are case sensitive and also dependent on what other output formatters are being used if any, so please read the sections on output parameters and study the examples in the tables carefully.
Input modification Parameters
Most web tags do not require any input parameters.
An input parameter is used where the same web tag can represent a value for a number of different past time instants. Each of those past time instants is represented by a different value for the input parameter. So a combination of web tag name and input parameter lets Cumulus to pick the value you want to see.
There are currently only two groups of tags where an input parameter is mandatory:
- The recent history tags where a separate value exists for potentially every individual minute in last week.
- These tags need between one and three input parameters as explained in linked section.
- To save you looking up the details, these input parameters specify how many minutes ago is required. To save entering a very large number for minutes, you can include separate input parameters for days, hours, and minutes, ago.
- These tags need between one and three input parameters as explained in linked section.
- The Webtags#Monthly_All_Time_Records where a separate value exists for each particular month (of any year).
- These tags need an input parameter specifying which month.
- To save you looking up the linked section, a single input parameter is needed (which is 1 for January to 12 for December, or 0 for current month).
Output modification parameters
- A few web tags always need an output format specifier
- Some web tags never use an output format specifier
- The majority of web tags either can use an output format parameter, but they have a default output if there is no output format modifier.
This page does not tell you which web tags fall into each of the above 3 types.
To make life more complicated, the availability of output format parameters for particular web tags is dependent on which Cumulus release you are running. There is a general discussion about applicability, but that does not yet specify dependencies for individualweb tags.
The output modification options available, if you are using a MX release, include:
- changing number of decimal places,
- removing decimal commas, and
- changing date and/or time format,
Each of these will be explained in turn.
Two Output (format modifier) parameters for decimal places
- dp=i is used for both Cumulus 1 and MX.
- The value i following the attribute dp is an integer, how many decimal places you want for the output you see.
There are restrictions on which web tags can use this output format modifier:
- The legacy Cumulus allows use of dp=n modifier (where n represents desired number of decimal places for latitude and longitude e.g. <#latitude dp=5> gives "59.24250".
- Modification of latitude and longitude is also available in MX.
- MX makes much more usage of these dp parameters.
- For example in the moon tags <#MoonPercent> and <#MoonPercentAbs>). Specifically, <#MoonAge> gives "11" but <#MoonAge dp=3> gives "11.234"
- In later releases of MX, any tag that gives a decimal output, can use the "dp=n" modifier.
- tc=y is a new parameter only in MX, the attribute tc takes the value 'y' to remove decimal places by truncation instead of using dp=0 which would round to nearest integer. e.g. <#MoonAge tc=y>. Later releases of MX implement this for any tag that by default outputs decimal places.
Output (format modifier) indicating remove commas
"rc=y" is a new parameter for MX, the attribute rc takes the value 'y' to replace any commas defined by the locale with full stops to separate integer and decimal parts of the output value. It was initially only implemented on a few new web tags (#MoonPercent, #MoonPercentAbs, #MoonAge) for MX versions up to and including 3.5.3. From version 3.6.6 only can all web tags that can output real numbers can now use alternative syntax of <#tag_name rc=y> to replace all commas in the output by a full stop (don't worry, MX does not use a comma for separating off thousands, so it is the decimal comma that becomes a decimal full stop like character when this remove comma specifier is used.
Why would you want to remove decimal commas? Well because the JavaScript language cannot understand decimal commas, and MX has several scripts written in this language, equally some third party alternative web pages rely on ajax to update them (and Ajax uses JavaScript).
Multiple Output Format Modifier parameters for times and dates
Time/Date format codes are used in two places:
- As part of report names for NOAA style reports (see this page for full details)
- As part of web-tags that report either times or dates, or report both a date and a time
These output format modifiers allow you to override the default display format for a particular web tag, using the format specifiers in the table below. The characters used to represent year, month, day, hour, minute, second, microsecond, and am/pm; all differ between C1 and MX.
Although, in theory, you can specify date formatting to times, and vice versa, this will not always yield a sensible result:
- It is best to look at the default format (in most, but not all, cases this reveals whether date and time information are both available):
- The time-stamps for today, and yesterday, only contain time information, so only time-based format instructions should be applied to them.
- You can use date format parameters on (for example) <#metdate>, and <#metdateyesterday> and that may give you your desired date information to augment any time-stamps.
- Almanac times such as sun-rise, moon-rise, are also only times, and time-based format instructions can generally be applied to them. However, be aware for some of your calendar days, the times may be reported (in default format) as '--' if for example the moon does not rise that day.
- You can choose whether 12-hour clock is used with am/pm, or the 24-hour clock is used.
- You can choose to include/exclude leading zero for hours.
- You can only report the hour if you don't care about the minutes, or only report the minutes if you don't need the hour.
- In most cases you can add seconds to the output, and in some cases either milliseconds or microseconds. This does not imply that Cumulus calculates everything every microsecond, in fact many are only calculated once a minute, but the flexibility is there for time outputs.
Time and date output modifiers in MX
These are available in all releases, and are case sensitive, so please see table for what is available. MX always has colon (':') between hour and minute numbers, but you can add seconds and microseconds by using output format modifiers. The "tt" modifier can be used to add "am/pm", but your locale settings will determine whether capital or lower case letters are output.
- Cumulus MX (when running on Windows) uses the .NET software which is provided as standard by Microsoft Windows.
- ".NET" was originally operating system independent, later only Microsoft Windows specific components were included, but since November 2020 ".Net" is used for an operating system independent version that originally Microsoft issued under another name!
- (actually it is possible to install and run "Mono").
- If Cumulus MX is running on Linux or Mac OS X, or any other device that uses an UNIX derived operating system, then MX uses Mono software for same purposes. (MONO is a operating system independent version of .NET, although they are developed independently, they have common origins).
- For Cumulus MX there are standard format codes (single characters) and custom format codes (combinations of characters, or single characters prefixed by %)
- The standard characters for dates and times are defined at standard-date-and-time-format-strings
- The custom characters for dates and times are defined at custom-date-and-time-format-strings
- In Cumulus MX the same character can have 4 different meanings depending on its case (capital letter or lower-case letter), and depending on whether it is on its own (standard format) or not (custom format)
Using HTML tags within format parameters (available in MX only)
Example using a class to change the look of part of the output
<#TapptempH format="dd' 'MMM' 'yyyy'<span class=\'xx\'> at 'HH:mm'</span>'">
the output from this will look like 04 Dec 2018 at 10:12
Note where the quotes are, and where you need to use '\' escape characters.
Example using HTML tags
<#RecentTS d=2 format="h:mm' 'tt'<small>on' d/M/yyyy'</small>'">
This puts the date in a smaller font than the time
Time and date output modifiers in legacy software
From version 1.9.1 most web-tags that report any form of time or date will accept an optional 'output format' parameter. The legacy Cumulus uses Delphi to interpret the output modifiers which is case-insensitive. Delphi has to use different letters, ignoring case, for each item. Consequently, most output formatting parameters are case insensitive, e.g. <#YearTempHT format=hh:nn>. However, in the legacy software, the case you use for any am/pm output format modifiers determines the case that is output.
For almanac web tags, these are calculated as at midnight GMT and so sunrise and sunset times will refer to different calendar days, and therefore the day-length parameters are (in places like UK) based on information for two different days! You cannot apply any parameters to day length tags.
The legacy cumulus (C1) can work with times using a full stop ('.') in the locale settings to separate the hour and minute figures (e.g. "14.26").
Some web tags contain dates, or both dates and times, and for these there is flexibility (apart from those with fixed format, these might have ISO, or another format indicator, in their tag name) as to how the date is output. Thus you can choose to include or exclude the year; you can represent month in letters or numbers, and you can vary the order in which elements of the date are shown.
In Cumulus 1 we are able to use "m" or "M" for two different meanings (minutes or month) depending on context. Similarly, in MX the same character sometimes has two different meanings depending on context, but this applies to lots of characters and the context is whether the character is used on its own or with other characters. Sounds confusing? Well it is complicated.
Migrating from legacy to MX
If you use NOAA type report functionality, and choose to transfer your existing existing configuration file (cumulus.ini) to MX, you need to be concerned about how to represent a month.
If you have created any Cumulus template files, then every place in each template, where an output modifiers is used to specify a date and/or time format, has to be edited. For web tags it is much more complicated, simply because it is not just month we may be representing, and we might require only one specifier (being careful whether we use a standard or custom modifier) or we might want to specify a combination of modifiers (and we might want to add a space character or other literals). It is difficult to summarise, but here are some potential issues:
- the reserved characters are different in C1 and MX (affecting use of literals like "on" and "at" that appear in many English time-stamps)
- MX introduces the concept of escaping characters (a \ placed before a character can be either a control sequence or an instruction to display the character)
- MX is inconsistent e.g. format=d gives a different result depending on the tag it is applied to (e.g. the script conditional '<#metdateyesterday format=d>' == '<#yesterday format=d)>' will never be equal as the LHS returns a full date and the right hand side returns day of month only)
- in MX space in some cases may need to be within the single quotes containing other literals (as in MX space can change the interpretation of a modifier character).
Confused even more now? I'm not surprised, but maybe some examples will help before we actually list the available modifiers.
Examples
- Examples related to case selection
- In Delphi, "nn" means "minutes" for Cumulus 1, but "minutes" is "mm" for .NET or MONO in Cumulus MX.
- The hour in 24-hour format with leading zero, in non case sensitive Delphi (Cumulus 1) 'HH' or 'hh' would be treated as same, but in .NET or MONO it must be "HH" (Cumulus MX).
- The hour in 24-hour format without leading zero, in non case sensitive Delphi (Cumulus 1) 'H' or 'h' would be treated as same, but in .NET or MONO it must be "%H" (Cumulus MX).
- For 12-hour specifiers, please see the table, as this is far more complicated.
- You might be put off by references within .NET and MONO (Cumulus MX) to single/standard characters and custom modifiers, the following 3 examples may add clarity:
- For example, <#MonthTempHD format="d"> is a single character format modifier, therefore the 'd' acts as a standard modifier, and causes for a date of 22 July 2014 for the highest temperature in the month to be returned in the standard short date format e.g. '22/07/2014' (exact contents for any one date vary by locale).
- Similarly, <#MonthTempHD format="M"> is a single character format modifier and therefore the 'M' acts as a standard modifier and causes the date for the highest temperature in the month to be returned in the standard day and month format e.g. '22 July' (exact contents for any one date vary by locale).
- Whilst <#metdate format="d M"> is not a single character format modifier and therefore both the 'd' and the 'M' are interpreted as custom modifiers and cause the current date to be returned as a digit(s) for the day and a digit(s) month (in a without leading zeroes format) e.g. '6 7' would be returned for 6 July.
- Alternatively, <#MonthTempHD format="%d"> is NOT a single character format modifier, therefore the 'd' acts as a custom modifier, and causes a date of 22 July 2014 for the highest temperature in the month to be returned as the day of the month only '22' in all locales.
- Similarly, <#MonthTempHD format="%M"> is NOT a single character format modifier and therefore the 'M' acts as a custom modifier and causes the same date for the highest temperature in the month to be returned as the month number '7'.
In both Cumulus 1 and MX if you want a space character within your output, the output specifiers must be enclosed in double quotes. If that space character is next to a non modifier (e.g. around word "at") then the single quote needing to surround the at should be widened to include the spaces in MX, but Cumulus 1 does not care if single quotes excluded spaces. However, with MX, single quotes enclose multiple characters, but there is an alternative way to deal with some single verbatim characters to cover next.
So let us compare these two alternative ways that MONO and .NET escape any characters that are not being used as format specifiers.
- In Delphi you can put the 'verbatim' characters inside single quotes (Cumulus 1); this is often used to (in English) include words like ' on ' and ' at ' in the formatted output.
- in .NET or MONO you can still use single quotes (as mentioned above extended to include adjacent spaces),
- but alternatively you can escape each verbatim character with a backslash as prefix (Cumulus MX).
- You may need to use both single quotes and back slashes in some format specifiers, depending whether the characters you want to include can be interpreted as control characters (yes, backslash is also used to escape control characters, so backslash will NOT work for some characters such as those in "on" and "at" [\n will produce new line not the letter n, \t will produce a tab not the letter t]), consequently for some characters you must use the literal approach to include them in your format.
List of allowed modifiers for output format parameters
Note for Cumulus 1 - where lower (or upper, for easier comparison with MX) case shown, because Delphi is case insensitive, upper (or lower) case (in some cases, indicated by use of curved brackets) could be used instead (exceptions: a/p, ampm, am/pm, Am/Pm, AM/PM, A/P, AMPM etc display as input).
Remember that most single character format specifiers have a different meaning to when the same letter appears in a multi-character format. The % shown in front of nearly every single character specifier in the table is not needed if that character is combined with other characters.
Forum reference
Steve Loft published a table showing comparison between output date modifiers for Cumulus 1 and MX at Cumulus MX forum. The table there was based on the table that was originally here for just Cumulus 1.
The subsequent comments in the forum suggested his layout got people confused. Most of that confusion came in two circumstances:
- When someone wanted to use one date or time modifier on its own
- When someone who had been using Cumulus 1 swapped to MX and wanted to replace a combination of output modifier characters
That all comes from the fact that when a MX modifier consists of a single character it can mean something different to when it appears with other characters. In Cumulus 1, "m" or "M" meant something different when it was combined with "H" or "h" (when it represented minutes), but in all other contexts it represented month. But for Cumulus 1, there is no other case where it matters what context a modifier is put in by the use of other modifiers, and no other modifier takes more than one meaning.
In MX it is much more complicated, to take a few examples "D", "H", "M" represent different items on their own to what they represent when combined with other characters. That other character can be as simple as a space or a "%" which modify the meaning of the character. So my modification of the table below is with the intention of demonstrating what characters mean when they are on their own and what they represent in the context of being with other characters. Looking at the table you can see "G" is used on its own because it represents a full date-time specifier. "D" is similarly used on its own represents the long date format. If we only want the day of month number we must use "%d" to avoid the meaning of short date format that "d" on its own represents. If we want the typical Cumulus date-stamp of day of month number and month "d M" and "M" will both work because "M" has a different meaning on its own and with another modifier.
My Revised Table of Time and Date Output Modifiers
In some rows of this table, square brackets [] indicate optional items, they are included just to make it clearer how items can be combined in a single output parameter.
Additional text in output format parameters
You should put anything that is additional, to the defined format modifier specification below, into single quotation marks to prevent it being interpreted as a date or time format modifier:
- For example, the word "on" contains the character "n", which for Cumulus versions 1.9.1 to 1.9.4 will be interpreted as a time format modifier unless you put it into single quotation marks. Example of valid Cumulus 1 syntax: <#TtempH format="'at' hh: mm 'on' dd / mm / yyyy">.
- You can include HTML tags (but they cannot have any attributes because both single and double quote characters have defined meanings) and special characters as quoted text within the 'format' parameter.
Example of valid syntax: <#TapptempH format="'at 'h:nn' 'am/pm '<small>on' d/m/yyyy'</small>'">.
Note for Cumulus 1 - if your format has any spaces in it, you must enclose the whole format parameter value in double quotes, for example (Cumulus 1.9.x): <#YearTempHT format="hh nn">. Consequently, you cannot include double quote characters in any other position (see here for work-around).
Note for MX - you can use single quotation marks round spaces and text (e.g. ' on '), but you can also use '\' as escape character (e.g. for 'on' use \o\n). However for 'at' the only alternative is \a't' because the character t has another meaning and escape followed by a "t" i.e. "\t" becomes a tab!