Is there a way of linking the caesar.cfg settings with each *._A model?

When the input processor opens and input (_A) file, the contents of the current configuration file are read. The configuration settings stored within the input (_A) file are updated at this time.

There is no facility to permanently tie or link a configuration file to an _A file.

You may isolate each _A file to a different data directory each with "corresponding" configuration file...

Yes I know I can do that. However when I am developing my models I often end up saving the model every hour or so as a different rev number and with all the good intentions in the world it is hard to keep recreating all these directoried. Also some companies file structures may not allow this.

One of my collegues, after finishing a job containing a number of files, cleaned up his models and put things into different directories but didn't realise that the configuration setup information wasn't attached to the file input and so hadn't copied over the configuration settings. (We use other stressing software packages and these settings are model specific). When we came back to the model we couldn't get it to run properly or converge. We were able to get into the original output file and so we could see the original configuration settings. However we had to do this for each model.

I try and write in the notes section of the front page all the configuration changes from the default so that this infomation stays with the model and can be easily recreated if required.

As far as I am concerned the configuration settings are model specific and so should be saved as such. If I make a change to a model configuration setting then I don't think this change should effect every other model in the same directory.

You just hit the nail on the head. This (affecting every model in the same directory) was the intent when we developed the configuration file idea years ago. We didn't want the configuration settings to be model specific.

Having said that, yes there will be occasions where for a certain job, the configuration must be tweaked. So I agree, the present setup can lead to problems in the future if the configuration file isn't saved with the input.

Perhaps one solution would be to devise a way to "fix" the configuration items in an input file so that they won't be updated from the configuration file. We'll have to think about this ...

One suggestion would be for user to save a copy of each "caesar.cfg" file for each revision of model. The modelREVxx could be matched to each "caesarREVxx.cfg" file that a user would rename to save particular values. This requires manually saving configuration files, as well as renaming any particular configuration back to the default "caesar.cfg" to restore and re-run a particular analysis. It's cumbersome, but I can understand keeping revisions of models when many iterations are required for large models.