File Saving Options - Saved File Format

This help topic may describe features of Temprecord products which are not all implemented at the release date of this version (6.3 or thereabouts) of the software.

You can specify the file format used to save local TRX files and also TRX files saved to the web.

Temprecord saves the data files in it's own proprietary format with a file type of TRX. These files can be saved in a "human-readable" form (sometimes known as "plain text"), making the data within them available for other applications.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a language for describing data that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. You can read more about it in this Wikipedia article. XML files tend to be bulkier than the other formats and are only recommended for instances where another application requires XML data.

JSON or JavaScript Object Notation, is another text-based open standard designed for human-readable data interchange. It is derived from the JavaScript scripting language for representing simple data structures and associative arrays, called objects. You can read more about JSON in this Wikipedia article.

The formatted JSON option generates the data in JSON still, but uses new lines and indentation to make the JSON structure easy to understand. JSON represented in this way is sometimes known as "prettified" JSON. Developers of third-party applications to read the TRX files may want to save data files as formatted JSON to aid them in parsing and interpreting the data.

Temprecord also allows you to include a digest with the files that you save. A digest is a small additional fragment of data that is generated from both the logger data within the file, and a key - this is a passphrase that you supply. The passphrase is normally only known to yourself and the recipient of the file, though the recipient need not know it. The important thing about the digest is that changing anything in the logger data stored in the file, or in the digest - no matter how small the change is - will result in the digest calculated from the data no longer agreeing with the digest stored in the file.

Although Temprecord can save TRX files in a number of formats, it can read them all. Unless you have reasons not to to so, we recommend that you stick with the installation default format of JSON. This format is compact, and faster to load and save.

If you require a TRX file in another format when you have already saved it in a particular format, simply load the file again, change this option to reflect the file format you need, and save the file again.