OrcaFlex Manual - Orcina

Automation, Text Data Files
4.3.2 Automating Generation
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The OrcaFlex Spreadsheet has facilities for automating the generation of text data files for a regular set of cases. To
use this facility select the Pre-processing worksheet, then select the Text Data Files cell and then click the Create
Text Data Files command which can be found on the OrcaFlex menu in Excel.
The basic idea is very similar to the facility for automating generation of batch script files. An example table is
shown below:
Figure: Example table for automatic text data file generation
The cell containing "Text Data Files", highlighted in yellow, is known as the anchor cell. The text data files are
generated based on the template file specified the in cell immediately to the right of the anchor cell. In this example
the template file might look like this:
BaseFile: Base Case.dat
Environment:
WaveDirection: %direction
WaveHeight: %height
Line1:
Length[1]: %length
The row immediately below the anchor cell, highlighted in blue, contains variable names. You are free to choose
these names as you please. We have adopted a convention that the variable names begin with a percentage sign (%).
Although you do not need to follow this convention, doing so will have the benefit of making the variable names
stand out.
The rows beneath the variable names row are known as the value rows. Each row defines a single text data file. The
text data file is generated by starting from the template file and then replacing each variable name, in turn, by the
value specified in the table. The %filename variable name is compulsory, that is it must be included as one of the
variable names. It specifies the name of the generated text data file. Relative paths can be used for the template file
name and the output file names.
The extent of the table is determined by the presence of empty cells. So the variable names row ends at the first
empty cell. Likewise the value rows end at the first empty cell in the column beneath the anchor cell.
The example above produces 8 text data files as its output, named Case01.yml, Case02.yml, etc. This first of these
looks like this:
BaseFile: Base Case.dat
Environment:
WaveDirection: 0
WaveHeight: 8
Line1:
Length[1]: 100
Note: The generated text data files adhere to the formatting specified in the Excel cells. So, if a cell is
formatted to have, say, 1 decimal place, the corresponding value in the text data file will also have
1 decimal place.
Choosing variable names
It is clearly important that you choose unique variable names. However, there is a further subtlety which can arise
when one variable name is a sub-string of another. For example, consider the variable names %x1 and %x10. When