Tip #66Kinesense LE

How to read dates from file names and set per-user settings

Add and test regular expressions that read the start time from file names, and give each named user their own settings files.

Patricia McCabeSoftware Engineer

We’ve already mentioned one of the new settings tabs in 3.3, Maps Settings. There is another new settings tab called Date Time Regex which we’ll go into more detail now. You can also now have customer settings per user.

Date Time Regex

The Date Time Regex tab in the Settings Editor, listing named regular expressions for reading dates from file names.

One of the ways Kinesense tries to read the start time of a file is by using regular expressions to read the name of the file. A regular expression is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern. If Kinesense isn’t reading the date from your file name properly you can contact us and we can give you a regular expression to add to this file, or if you can do it yourself if fighting with regular expressions is your thing.

To add a new expression click the Add Regex button Add Regex button and a blank entry will appear in the list. Add the name you want to use to identify the expression as and the expression itself. Then click save.

The Regex Tester, with a box for a test file name and the detected date and time.

If you want to test to see that your new regular expression works, you can either click Test to the right of the regex, or expand out the Regex Tester at the bottom of the page. Paste in the name of one of the files you want to get the date from. The detected date and time will appear at the bottom of the screen.

Custom user settings

The SettingsFiles folder in Windows File Explorer, with a folder for each username.

If you have a named users setup, you can now have settings files based on usernames rather than on the machine they’re on. For instance if 2 users use the same machine but one only ever imports and the other does everything else you could have a different FeatureVisibilityList for each user even though they are on the same machine. To do this, create a folder with their username in the folder C:\KinesenseData\SettingsFiles. Put the custom settings files into the folder for that user. When the log in using that username those custom settings will be applied. Any settings files that aren’t in that folder will be read from the main settings folders.

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