• Color tables
• The data chooser user interface
• The derived quantities and formulas
• Jython libraries
• Display defaults for parameters
• Parameter aliases
• Help tips
• Projections
• Available data sources
• Available displays
• Where the favorite bundles are
• Maps
• Layout models

By default McIDAS-V looks in four places for the resources it uses to configure itself. A user can enter the full path to the resource file, or use one of the four macros below which McIDAS-V will replace with the appropriate path:

• %USERPATH% - This is the ~user/McIDAS-V directory that gets created for each user. While this path may be defined by the -userpath or -tempuserpath command line arguments, the default location varies by platform:
• Windows - C:\Users\username\McIDAS-V
• Linux - /home/username/McIDAS-V
• OS X/macOS - /Users/username/Documents/McIDAS-V
• %SITEPATH% - This is the file directory or URL directory that can be defined as a command line argument -sitepath. This path is used to allow administrators to specify site-specific configurations.
• %IDVPATH% - This is the file directory containing configuration files that McIDAS-V inherits from Unidata's IDV. Note that these files are primarily located within idv.jar, but in some situations may also be found in local-idv.jar. The path to the resources in both of the JAR files is /ucar/unidata/idv/resources.
• %APPPATH% - This is the path used for McIDAS-V configuration files. These files will be in the /edu/wisc/ssec/mcidasv/resources path contained in mcidasv.jar. This path is specified by the idv.resourcepath property found in /edu/wisc/ssec/mcidasv/resources/mcidasv.properties file.

idv.properties = %APPPATH%/mcidasv.properties;%SITEPATH%/mcidasv.properties;%USERPATH%/mcidasv.properties;

-properties your_properties_file

Once the properties have been processed McIDAS-V initializes its resources by reading in one or more resource definition files. These are called "RBI" files - (Resource Bundle for the IDV). These are XML files, the locations of which are defined by the idv.resourcefiles property:

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

  <resources name="idv.resource.colortables" loadmore="true">
    <resource location="%USERPATH%/colortables.xml"/>
    <resource location="%SITEPATH%/colortables.xml"/>
    <resource location="http://www.somewebsite.edu/somepath/colortables.xml"/>
  </resources>

The example above tells McIDAS-V to look for color tables in the user path, sitepath, and an online URL. McIDAS-V uses the first entry in this list as the file path to write out color tables that are created using the color table editor.

The loadmore tag for the colortable resource is set to "true" by default. When this is set to true, then the colortables resource contained in all of the directories in the idv.resourcefiles property will be used, meaning the user will have access to system color tables (in the %APPPATH% directory) as well. If this loadmore tag were set to "false", then only the mcidasv.rbi contained in the %USERPATH% directory (the first path contained in the idv.resourcefiles property) would be used for the colortables resource, system resource.

This gives the flexibility to customize McIDAS-V to us only resources set by the user and not those used by McIDAS-V by default. This mcidasv.rbi file does not contain all of the resource files available for use by McIDAS-V, but instead contains a subset of commonly-used resources. Additional resources can be added to this file by the user.

An example use case of this mcidasv.rbi file is if your site needs to use a set of special color tables that you have created. Once the color tables have been created in McIDAS-V, they are saved to ~user/McIDAS-V/colortables.xml (as defined by the resource paths defined in the app path's mcidasv.rbi). This file can then be copied to a web site or on a shared file system that is pointed to by the McIDAS-V -sitepath flag. Now, your users simply need to define the -sitepath at startup and they will naturally pick up the color tables saved in colortables.xml.