Property Names

Properties of entries have two names: an internal name and a display name, or visible name. The display name is the name that is shown in the headings of the Project Table columns. Properties also belong to a “family”, and the family name is shown in menus used for property selection.

The internal name is the name used by Maestro to identify the property, and is the name that is written to and read from Maestro files. The internal name has the format type_owner_label. The type is a single character, which identifies the variable as an integer (i), a real number (r), a string (s), or a Boolean (b). The owner identifies the program that generated the property, or more generally the source of the property. Finally, the label, or data name, gives information about the property itself. For example, s_m_title is the internal name of a string property generated by the owner m (which stands for Maestro) that is the title of the entry.

When the internal name is parsed by Maestro, it is split into the three pieces. The type is used to assign a variable internally to store the property value. The owner is mapped to the “family” name, and the label is mapped to the display name. Maestro has a table of mappings of the owner to the family names and of the label to the display names. If there is no entry for label in the map, then the display name is constructed by replacing any underscores in label with spaces: thus, if the label is My_property, the display name is My property. Likewise, owner is displayed without change for the family name if it has no entry in the map. There are a few exceptions: Phase properties whose label starts with Shape are mapped to the family Shape rather than to Phase. A list of owners and their mappings is given in Table 1. The list of property names is much larger, and is not given here. The display names are stored as part of the project.

The display name and the internal name can both be changed within a Maestro session, in the Change Property Dialog Box. The display name is used only in the project. It is the internal name that is exported when you export structures. If you want to export a property with a new name (for example to an SD file), you can create a new property, and copy the desired property to the new property for export. The owner for the new property in this case is user, by default. You can change the owner, but since the owner and type are stripped out when exporting to an SD file, the owner is not relevant in this case.

For SD properties, you can protect the underscore characters so that they are displayed in the Project Table by preceding them with backslash characters.

Atom properties also have an internal name and a display name. The internal name has the same format as the entry properties, and the display name is derived in the same way as for entry properties that do not have a mapping, i.e. the type and the owner are stripped off, and any remaining underscores are replaced by spaces. The display name for atom properties is shown in option menus for selection of an atom property, for example.