Both Giovanni Di Conza and now Giorgio Camorani have a legitimate complaint about SWMM 5 not accepting edits made to the time step parameters in its Analysis Options dialog window. As Gabriele Freni pointed out, the problem is related to the Regional Settings one uses for Windows. In this case, a period '.' was being used by Windows for the time separator character instead of the colon ':' that SWMM 5 expected to see. When the input file generated from the GUI was passed to the engine, the time step value was interpreted as decimal hours instead of hrs:min:sec. The Masked Edit control that is used to accept time edits is hard-wired into the Windows Regional Settings, and will always format time as hrs.mins.secs if a period is defined in Windows as the separator and no action to override this is taken in the program.

The next update (Beta B) will fix this by setting the time separator in the code to ':'. This will not affect the Regional Settings for time used by other programs, just SWMM 5. I should note that a similar thing is done now in the SWMM 5 GUI code for the date separator (a '-' is used) and the decimal separator (a '.' is used). Again, these settings only apply to runs of SWMM 5. The decimal separator is somewhat problematic for folks in countries where a comma is used, particularly if they want to import or cut/paste data into SWMM 5 that has commas in it.

Lewis Rossman
rossman.lewis@epa.gov