3.10 Files and File Formats

RAYGUIDE will be installed at the location where chosen during installation. The standard path is C:\Program Files\RAYLASE\RAYGUIDE\.

In this folder are the subfolders bin, which contains the application and its needed DLLs, the folder Documentation which contains the documentation for RAYGUIDE and the SDK, and the folder SDK with our Software Development Kit.

If the SDK is used it is recommended to copy the complete folder SDK to a place where write access is available (which is normally not the case in the standard path). The folder contains all needed library DLLs; all sample projects have references to them, and one can be sure that the references are found if the complete SDK folder is copied (rather than only the sample folder).

Another folder of interest: bin\Plugins is scanned for plug-ins by RAYGUIDE at application start; own plug-ins (developed with the SDK) must to be copied into this folder therefore to make sure they are loaded by RAYGUIDE.

When RAYGUIDE is started the first time, it will create the folder with its system configurations and log files:
C:\ProgramData\RAYLASE\RAYGUIDE\.

When starting your own application that is using the API, it will create a folder with the same name as your application instead. Example: If your application has the name "HelloWorld", the folder will be C:\ProgramData\HelloWorld\.

There are three subfolders:

• Configurations: Stores the system wide settings (in opposite to the user settings mentioned below) as available devices, configured stand alone jobs etc. and the system preferences which can be defined in RAYGUIDE with the System menu item; see chapters Device Configuration and Calibration and Preferences in the RAYGUIDE User Manual. These files are stored in the JSON format and are readable with any editor.

• Logs: Here are the log files which are produced by RAYGUIDE and the SP-ICE-3 card. These are regular ASCII files which can be viewed with any editor.

• Resources: This folder is of special interest for developers who want to write plug-ins for RAYGUIDE. In this folder is another subfolder Icons in which the icon files, if needed by the plug-ins, have to be put in.
  The icon files must be in SVG format; those files can be easily created with the open source application Inkscape for example. Attention: The SVG file must not contain groups!

When RAYGUIDE is started the first time by a user, it will create the folder with its user specific configurations:
C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Local\RAYLASE\RAYGUIDE\Configurations.

When starting an application that is using the API, it will create a folder with the same name as your application instead. Example: If the application has the name "HelloWorld", the folder will be C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Local\HelloWorld\Configurations\..

It contains basically the settings a user can make in RAYGUIDE's user preferences dialog (see chapter Preferences in the RAYGUIDE User Manual), RAYGUIDE's current panel layout, the history of the last opened jobs etc. The files are in JSON format.

Job files have the file extension ".rg" and store all data needed to recreate a job. The file is actually a renamed ZIP file and contains a JSON file named JobDefinition.json which is a serialization of the JobDefinition class. It describes the job in all aspects, i. e. contained objects, their geometry, transformations, pens etc. If there are bitmap objects in the job, and the setting Insert has been chosen in their properties, the bitmaps are stored as individual files in the ZIP file.