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Here we group the description of the legal syntax for attributes that are used throughout the Work Flow editor.
There are several rules that need to be followed to select a valid node name. First of all, node names must be unique within a Work Flow. This means that no two nodes can have the same name, even if they live in different subsystems. Second, the maximum lenght for node names is limited to 32 characters. Furthermore, the first character must be a letter, and the other characters can only be a letter, a digit, the underscore or the dot character. Finally, node names cannot be equal to one of the reserved keywords (see table below), and they cannot be made up by appending an integer number to one of the reserved prefixes (see table below).
| ID | ceil | ln | rand | utilmax |
| RID | cos | log | round | utilmin |
| abs | degtorad | max | sgn | vect |
| acos | exp | min | sin | |
| asin | floor | mod | sqrt | |
| atan | interp | radtodeg | tan |
Table 4.1. Reserved Keywords
| AMESim | Application | Constraint | Calc |
| Catia | DOE | End | Excel |
| Input | InputDataFile | InputFile | Matlab |
| Objective | Output | OutputDataFile | OutputFile |
| ProEngineer | Remote | Scheduler | SendMail |
| Start | SupportFile | Suspend | SyncEnd |
| SyncStart | Switch | TransFile | TransVar |
| Utility | Workbench |
Table 4.2. Reserved Name Prefixes
Several nodes (Input Variable, Output Variable, Transfer Variable, Objective and Constraint) within a modeFRONTIER Work Flow are associated with a numeric value at run-time. These values are then displayed in the Designs Database, or are dropped within an Input File for further processing by an external application. In all these instances the proper handling of these values might require that they are formatted following a precise pattern. Accordingly, within modeFRONTIER you can impose a format pattern for each node belonging to one of the above mentioned types, and for each variable that you drop in an Input File.
The formatting pattern must be a sequence of characters. Allowed characters are the zero digit, the pound character (#), the exponent character (E), the dot (decimal separator) and the minus sign. The zero digit is used to indicate the presence of a generic digit, whereas the pound sign indicates that a digit should be displayed if present and if not a trailing zero. Let's now look at a few examples.
Suppose, for example, that a variable contains the 123.720462 value, and let's see how the value would be displayed using different legal formatting patterns.
| Formatting Pattern | Displayed Value |
|---|---|
| 0 | 124 |
| # | 124 |
| 0.000 | 123.720 |
| 0.### | 123.72 |
| 0.0000 | 123.7205 |
| 0.0000E0 | 1.2372E2 |
| 00.000E0 | 12.372E1 |
| 00.000E000 | 12.372E001 |
Conditional links (see Section 4.2.2, "Working with Links") are transversed if, and only if, the condition associated to them holds true at run-time. Depending on the origin node for the link, the condition is applied to a different value. More precisely, if the origin node is an application, the condition implicitly refers to the exit value for the application. If instead the origin node is a switch, the condition refers to the value of the switch expression. Said this, the condition is then simply a logical expression on this value (Note: in the condition the value is always implicit, and is not indicated by any tag).
The only valid operators for defining a condition are:
Equal (e.g., =0)
Greater Than (e.g., >0)
Less Than (e.g., <0)
Equal or Greater Than (e.g., >=0)
Equal or Less Than (e.g., <=0)
Not Equal (e.g., <>0)
These basic conditions can then be combined using the OR and AND boolean operators to specify ranges (e.g., >5 & <8 or its opposite <5 | >8).