Simple Substitution

Velocity templates consist of regular text which will be printed as is and special varibles which will have values for items SOD is currently processing substitued for their text. A variable substitution always begins with a dollar sign and is followed by the name of the variable to be substituted. For example, if '$channel' appears in a Velocity template and channel is an available variable, the text value for channel will be substitued in the template. If a channel weren't available, '$channel' would just show up in the output. You can tell if you've made a typo in a variable name or are trying to use a variable that isn't available in the current context if it just appears in the output unreplaced.

Accessing Subfields

All of the variables exposed to SOD also contain subfields. The output from the variable name itself summarizes the entire variable, and the indiviual fields that make that up are available by adding '.' to the variable. So on the channel variable from earlier, its code can be inserted into the output by using its code subfield like '$channel.code'. If a subfield has subfields of its own, they can be accessed with additional '.' accessors. So '$channel.site.code' is another valid variable access on channel. All of the subfields for variables are listed in the variable types section.

If in your output you want to use a subfield from a variable followed by another period, the subfield access and regular text need to be separated so Velocity knows not to follow down into the variable indefinitely. By encasing the field access past the dollar sign in curly braces you tell Velocity where to stop interpreting. For example if we're using our channel code to generate a file name for a sac file and we want to append '.sac' to the file we could use the template '${channel.code}.sac' and Velocity would print 'BHZ.sac'.

Time subfields can be formatted in addition to being printed out in their default forms. For any time field you can just print it out with '.' or you can format it in a certain way using 'get('format string')'. So on events, you can print out the default formatting of the time as '$event.time' or you can use a particular time formatting with '$event.getTime('yyyy-MM-dd')'. The time formatting is based on Java's SimpleDateFormat, so any valid time format from there can be used.

Accessing Lists

If a template contains multiple instances of an item, they're contained in a list. For example the printlineSeismogramProcess has a list of seismograms available to it called 'seismograms'. To get the number of items in a list, use '$<fieldname>.size()' ie to get the number of seismograms in the printlineSeismogramProcess use '$seismograms.size()'. To access and print information about each item in a list requires use of a foreach loop in Velocity. This looks like

	#foreach($seismogram in $seismograms)
	$seismogram
	#end
	

With this construct, every item in the list is assigned to the variable and then the text inbetween the #foreach and #end is inserted into the result. #foreach and #end can be on the same line if you don't want each list item's output to be on a different line. To access only the first item in the list use '$<listname>.get(0)', ie to print only the begin time for the first seismogram you could use '$seismograms.get(0).begin'.