Can openlca read databases from an external drive on a Mac

Question

I have a student who does not have sufficient space on his internal hard drive. He would like to redirect openLCA to an external drive when using/activating databases. Is that possible? There appears to be one question on ask.openlca that tells how to redirect openLCA in windows by changing the openlca.ini file. Is there a comparable trick for Macs?

Answer 1

Indeed, it is possible to change the location of the database folder, in the openLCA.ini (which is in the same folder as openLCA.exe):

The start could be

-nl
en
-olcaDataDir
C:\...the_new_path_to_the_database_folder
...

Make a backup of the file before, then edit and save it.

On a Mac, it should be the same. olcaDataDir needs to be written exactly as above.

Hth, Andreas

Comments

A quick follow up--how do I find the openLCA.ini file on a Mac? It seems to be hidden.

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With the file finder, https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201732. Apple does not show the files directly.

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Actually, the support page doesn't address how to find this kind of file. I did, however, stumble on how to do this. Hopefully this is information that will be useful to other Mac users:

1. In the finder, right click on the openLCA application
2. In the contextual menu, select "Show package contents"
3. This exposes a directory containing folders called "Content" and "jre"
4. Right-click on the "Content" folder and again select "Show package contents" from the menu
5. This exposes three folders. Expand or double click on  the folder called "MacOS".
6. There (finally), you will see the openlca.ini file that can be edited as you describe.

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Ah thank you, that is really useful. Not at a Mac I could not be that specific now.

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Note that on macOS it is not the openLCA.ini file that is used for the configuration but the file Contents/Eclipse/eclipse.ini in the package content. So you would have to set the -olcaDataDir parameter in this file (with a full path to a folder where you have write access; which of course would not start with C:\ on macOS).