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User Guide

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DecoderPro User Guide - Configuration Files

This section attempts to answer the questions of what the configuration files contain and where they are located?

Configuration file locations
There are two places where configuration files can be found:
  1. The user's JMRI preferences directory and its subdirectories. This is searched first for any needed files. You should put any locally-modified versions of files here so they don't get overwritten by a new version of the program. Any files that the program writes to contain local information, e.g. roster entries, are also written here.

    The location of this varies by computer type. The easiest way to find it is to start a JMRI program, e.g. DecoderPro or PanelPro, and select "Locations ..." from the "Help" menu.

    As a special treat for Windows users, if you go to the Windows Start Menu, in the JMRI section, you can select "Preferences" to have it open that directory for you.

    Normally, it's located

    • On a Linux machine, look for a .jmri directory in your home directory.
    • On MacOS X, preferences are stored in a "JMRI" directory in the Library/Preferences folder in your user directory.
    • On Windows, this can be in a number of places depending on which Windows version you're running and whether you have multiple users configured. Start by looking under "Documents" or "User Documents" or "Users and Documents". You're looking for a folder called "JMRI".
    If you have to search for it, as opposed to having the program tell you where it is, make sure you find the preferences directory, and not the original application package. They are kept separate to simplify updating the program version. You'll know you've found the right place if you see the preferences files that store your applications settings: DecoderProConfig2.xml, JmriDemoConfig2.xml and/or LocoToolsConfig2.xml. You can also search for one of those files to find this directory
  2. The originally-distributed versions of files are contained in an 'xml' directory in the application package and its subdirectories. Anything you modify here will be lost when you update the program to a new version.
Types of configuration files
Within these two locations, there are a number of types of configuration files:
  • Decoder definitions - Stored in the 'decoders' subdirectory, these define how a specific family of decoders is configured.
  • Programmer definitions - Stored in the 'programmers' subdirectory, these define the formats for the various programming sheets that are available in Decoder Pro.
  • Locomotive configurations - Stored in the 'roster' subdirectory, these record the specific configuration of each locomotive in your roster.
General Config files
There are also a few general configuration files, which live in the top-level xml or prefs directory:
  • roster.xml - an index of your locomotives
  • decoderIndex.xml - an index of the available decoder definition files. It also contains the information on which specific decoder model uses which file, how to identify them, and what options they implement.
  • names.xml - not used during normal operation, this is a list of the standard variable names for use in programmer definitions.