Yesterday.ini

Introduction

The files today.ini and yesterday.ini are used by Cumulus to store some counts, plus the Highs and Lows (and their timestamps) for key parameters as reached on each of the two days.

You can view these figures, for Cumulus 1 these are source for figures that appear on the main screen, for Cumulus 2 and 3(MX) they appear in the admin interface pages you can view. These files are normally located in the "Data" sub-folder of the path where your Cumulus.exe is installed. See FAQ on location of data log files for where else to look.

For those people who use a 9 am or 10 am rollover, the yesterday.ini file will be updated twice each day, at midnight (when the [Solar] section is updated) and at rollover (when other sections are updated from today.ini, as the corresponding fields for the new dayfile.txt line are worked out).

For those people who use midnight rollover, yesterday.ini is updated just one a day (when all sections are updated from today.ini, as the corresponding fields for the new dayfile.txt line are worked out).

Don't try to edit 'yesterday.ini' within a few minutes before or after these updating times as Cumulus needs exclusive access to delete the old file and create a new one.

File Content

It may be noticed that yesterday.ini is (apart from solar exception to be described below) simply duplicating information shown in the existing latest line in dayfile.txt. Consequently, if there is a rogue value within "yesterday.ini", the correction should actually be made to the latest line found in dayfile.txt.

Refer to the today.ini page for information on how Cumulus generates yesterday.ini from today.ini.

The original purpose of introducing yesterday.ini was simply to provide an easier way for Cumulus 1 to display yesterday's extremes on its main screen. The file is re-created at each rollover time, and Cumulus 1 would only read the file when Cumulus is restarted and the main screen needed to be generated.

However, when version 1.9.0 added Sunshine Hours as field 25 in "dayfile.txt", a new use of "yesterday.ini" emerged. Sunshine hours are counted from one minute past midnight to the subsequent midnight. For those using a 9 am or 10 am rollover, the sunshine hours count will be reset to zero during their meteorological day, this means somewhere is needed to hold the previous sunshine hour count, thus the [Solar] section was added to "yesterday.ini" as it holds what goes into the new line of "dayfile.txt" when rollover happens 9 or 10 hours later.

Format of the file

The format for all .ini files is described here, where some differences between the legacy Cumulus and MX are noted.

The sections (after the first [General]) can be in any order, Cumulus will maintain whatever order the sections are currently in.

For readability you can insert blank lines into this file anywhere, Cumulus will not mind.

Do not however introduce any punctuation, nor change the position or format of any parameter line within a section.

Sections in yesterday.ini

Each section is headed with something in square brackets [], then a number of parameters in format "attribute=value".

The first section is [General], it contains just one parameter Date=xxxxx. The value for that Date attribute is just the date in Cumulus 1 using the Microsoft Windows Short Date Format, but in MX it is a time-stamp containing date and time in ISO 8601 format of "yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss" (using the net specifiers that MX uses) of when the file was last updated.

Some of the subsequent sections are shown in the file example at the end of this page.

Some releases add an extra section not included in the previous release, to reflect the way that as time goes by Cumulus is adding more functionality.

Most of the parameters correspond to fields in the dayfile.txt log file.

Specific Differences for this file between Cumulus 1 and Cumulus MX

There are more sections in the current MX version of this file compared with that in Cumulus 1.9.4, just as functionality was added during the development of the legacy Cumulus, functionality has been added during the development of MX. As just one example, MX introduced an extra section for Feels Like at release 3.6.0.

It may be best not to copy your Cumulus 1 yesterday.ini file into MX when you are copying other files from your Cumulus 1 data folder to within your cumulus MX structure.

Instead, let MX create a new yesterday.ini log file when it does the next update (see #Introduction). You will find some data is missing (during remainder of your first day) from pages displaying yesterday's data, but in all other respects MX will be working well without this file.

Remember, the symbol for decimal point might vary:

Decimal formatting always uses a period/full stop in Cumulus MX.

Decimal formatting is as per your regional settings on the PC running Cumulus.

Example yesterday.ini

See Average_temperature for one key transformation between today.ini and yesterday.ini, no ET parameters are retained, plus there are some wind and some rain parameters not copied from today.ini to yesterday.ini. This log file is exactly same in Cumulus 1, 2, and 3 (MX), apart from the extra [FeelsLike] section introduced from version 3.6.0.

NOTE: Yesterday's total rainfall from weather station is stored in today.ini, but yesterday's total rainfall from RG-11 sensor is stored in yesterday.ini.

[General]
Date=28/04/2011

[Wind]
Speed=7.2
SpTime=09:00
Gust=15.9
Time=12:15
Bearing=315
Direction=NW
Windrun=35.3391151428223
DominantWindBearing=230

[Temp]
Low=5.6
LTime=05:34
High=21.0
HTime=14:46
HeatingDegreeDays=3.76118206977844
CoolingDegreeDays=0.702986478805542
AvgTemp=12.4447975158691

[Pressure]
Low=29.72
LTime=09:00
High=29.85
HTime=22:12

[Rain]
High=1.2
HTime=00:34
HourlyHigh=0.899999976158142
HHourlyTime=02:04
RG11Yesterday=0

[Humidity]
Low=49
High=99
LTime=14:34
HTime=00:34

[Solar]
SunshineHours=0
HighSolarRad=0
HighSolarRadTime=09:00
HighUV=0
HighUVTime=09:00

[HeatIndex]
High=21
HTime=14:46

[AppTemp]
Low=3.98110413551331
LTime=05:34
High=21.0052318572998
HTime=15:50

[WindChill]
Low=5.59999990463257
LTime=05:34

[Dewpoint]
Low=5.4555492401123
LTime=05:34
High=11.6547174453735
HTime=09:03