Saving, loading and exporting

GLN Analysis is one of three modules of a single Analysis Suite project. The drawing, the properties of every component, the pump library, the heat carrier fluid and the project description all travel inside the project's .ghe file, alongside whatever GHE and TRT work shares it. Reopening the file restores the network as it was left, including its working view, and solves it with its own fluid.

Creating, saving and opening a project - While the GLN module is active, New , Open , Save and Save as , in the application toolbar, all act on the .ghe project, not on the drawing alone: New clears every module at once, and Save writes the network together with whatever GHE and TRT work accompanies it. There is no separate network-only save.

If the drawing has unsaved changes, New first asks Save / Discard / Cancel, before anything is cleared. Open uses a single dialog for the whole suite, and opening a .ghe project activates the GHE module: switch back to GLN with the module button of the toolbar. The file is checked before anything on screen is cleared: a corrupt or unrelated file is refused with the reason, and the current project is left intact.

The .ghe project file - A .ghe file is a compact binary archive (CBOR-encoded JSON) carrying the full project state: the drawing and the properties of every node and pipe, the pump library, the fluid and its concentration, and whatever GHE and TRT work accompanies them. It is written to a temporary file that replaces the project file only once complete, so a crash or a full disk leaves the previous version intact.

Inside, each module owns its own block with its own schema number. A block written by a later release that this one cannot read is kept and written back unchanged, so nothing is lost when a project goes back and forth between versions.

Because the three modules share the file, a project opened and saved from one of them keeps what the others hold.

Besides the nodes and pipes, the project stores four things that affect the results or the drawing when it is reopened:

• the pump library, so a node that references a pump by name still finds its curve;
• the heat carrier fluid and its concentration, since ρ and µ enter every pressure loss; it is independent of the fluid chosen in the GHE module;
• the project description, the one element shared with the other modules, so the drawing stays attached to the project that produced it;
• the working view, plan or isometric, since the two views do not share the same snap grid.

A file written by an earlier release opens normally; fields that did not exist then take a fixed default. Pumps read from an older file, for instance, report a hydraulic efficiency of 100 %.

Automatic export of the results - Each time the project is saved, the results of the network are written beside the .ghe file in {project}_GLN_Results.csv, the same way the GHE and TRT modules write theirs. There is no export button: saving is the only step. The file is overwritten at each save.

The file always describes the drawing that was saved. If the last computation no longer matches the drawing, a computation is run before the file is written. Nothing is written when the project holds no network or when no computation converges, and the file left by a previous save is then deleted so that it cannot be mistaken for current results.

The file follows the conventions shared by every CSV of the suite: columns separated by semicolons, a point as decimal separator, SI units whatever unit system the interface displays, UTF-8 encoding that Excel reads correctly, and a few opening lines starting with # that give the project name, the software version and the date of the save. An empty cell means that no value is defined, which is not the same as zero.

Inside the results file - Three short tables come first, because what they hold is the attribute of no pipe:

• the solver status: whether the computation converged, in how many iterations and to what flow residual, and any network left out of the computation with the reason;
• the fluid of each network, at the temperature the network was computed at: name, static pressure, density and dynamic viscosity, as they entered the calculation;
• the pump operating points, one line per pump node: network, control mode and setpoint, the curve it was resolved against, and Q, TDH, hydraulic power, efficiency, electrical power and the fraction of the curve's capacity it uses. Only the two powers are totalled, since two heads do not add.

The main table follows, with one row per pipe carrying the properties and results of its two end nodes in From_… and To_… columns. Each row stands on its own, like a line of a pipe schedule: network, pipe id and label, internal diameter, length and whether that length was typed or is still the seed taken from the drawing, the minor-loss coefficient of each end, then flow, velocity, Reynolds number, Darcy friction factor and flow regime, then dP_nodes (the difference between the two end pressures) and h_L (the head loss of the pipe itself), then, for each end node, its id, label, component type, elevation, pressure and singular loss, and finally the pipe's note. Internal edges of composite devices are not listed, and a node that touches no pipe still gets a row of its own.

A node shared by several pipes repeats its values on each of their rows. Those columns are made to be filtered, never totalled. The result cells of a network left out of the computation are empty.

Archetypes - An archetype is a piece of network saved on its own, outside any project, so that recurring pipework does not have to be redrawn.

The archetype commands are the third and fourth buttons of the row under the Network and components panel of the Hydraulic network page, after Undo and Redo.

Select the nodes and pipes concerned — at least one node — then press Save the selection as an archetype . A short form opens in the Properties panel asking for a name, a category and a description; the archetype is then written to the application data folder as a .hya file, plain readable JSON, with a 320 × 240 .png thumbnail beside it.

Insert an archetype , the button next to it, opens the gallery in that same Properties panel. It lists the archetypes shipped with the application alongside those saved from earlier drawings, each with its thumbnail. The archetype selected is inserted with a translucent preview that follows the cursor until the next click. Archetypes are independent of any project, so a plant room drawn once is available in every network afterwards. The application ships two borehole fields, eight single-U and eight double-U boreholes; they are drawn in isometric view and are inserted on an isometric canvas only.

An archetype that would take the drawing past the pipe limit of the current licence is listed greyed, with the number of pipes it would add and the limit of the licence.

Your own archetypes are maintained from the same gallery. Edit… reopens the save form on the selected archetype to change its name, category or description; renaming renames the file and its thumbnail. Delete moves the archetype and its thumbnail to the recycle bin, where it can be restored. Both buttons are greyed on the archetypes shipped with the application. To change the network itself, insert the archetype, modify it on the canvas, select it and save it again under the same name: the application asks before replacing the existing one.

Saving a picture of the drawing - The camera button of the same row, right after the archetype pair, saves the active view as it is framed on screen: a PNG, or a 30 s animated GIF when the flow animation is running. Resolution and frame rate are given under Capturing the view, in the Hydraulic network chapter.

The file is proposed next to the open project and named after it. If it cannot be written, most often because it is still open in another application, the status line reports it and nothing is overwritten.