The Variable Explorer

Published on May 12, 2009 by Marcus Tettmar in Automation, General, Scripting

An experienced Macro Scheduler scripter was recently trying to figure out why the following code wasn’t doing what he expected:

If>seg_1=05
  Let>monLtr=mm
Endif

Apparantly monLtr was always being set to 05.  This told me that “mm” must have been a variable which had earlier been set to 05.   But my friend said “I’ve looked all through the code I can’t see where “mm” is set anywhere”.  

Then I reminded him of the Variable Explorer.  “The what?” he asked.

varexplorerUnder the editor select Tools/Variable Explorer or hit Ctrl-Alt-V and you’ll get a box like this one.  It shows a list of all the variables created by your script.  

Bingo!  There’s mm.  Expand it and you’ll see all the lines where it is set/created.   In this case it’s created on line 40 by the Min command.  

In a long script it’s easy not to see the obvious.  The Variable Explorer makes it easier.

Of course, it would also be sensible to use a better naming convention for the variable to avoid such confusion.  Or use VAREXPLICIT or he could have used {“mm”} to specify the literal string value.   But don’t forget the Variable Explorer as it can save a lot of hunting around.