Maximum number of variables in FM?

[Diane Gaskill]

Hi Rick,

10,000?  That's considerably more than I expected.  Thanks lots for doing that.  I've just gotta make the time to learn FS. :-)

I'm not sure how many we need, maybe 100 or so.  We're trying to come up with a common set of variables that we can use across the department for all the versions of the products we document.  This is part of our content modeling and reusability plan.  We also single source some of the docs to RH and also rebrand some of our our docs for an OEM customer.  Challenging, for sure.

Now all we have to do is make sure that the variables save in XML.  According to the FM help, they do. As you know, one of our OEMs uses Arbortext and we use a DocBook template that creates XML that they can import.  Even more challenging, to put it nicely, because profile attribute settings (the DocBook XML equivalent of conditional text) cannot be imported across the book from one chapter like conditional text can.  I'm told that there is no function in the FDK that can do this, so apparently FS cannot solve this problem.  

Thanks again.

Diane
================= 

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Quatro [mailto:rick at rickquatro.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 4:57 AM
To: 'Diane Gaskill'; framers at lists.frameusers.com
Cc: 'Matt Sullivan'
Subject: RE: Maximum number of variables in FM?


Hi Diane,

I am not sure what the limit is, but I just used this little code snippet to create 10,000 of them in a blank document, and it seemed to work fine. 

Loop While(i <= 10000) LoopVar(i) Init(1) Incr(1)
  New VariableFormat DocObject(ActiveDoc) Name('Variable'+i);
EndLoop
  
How many do you need?

Rick Quatro
Carmen Publishing Inc.
585-659-8267
rick at frameexpert.com
www.frameexpert.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Diane Gaskill [mailto:dgcaller at earthlink.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 12:15 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Cc: Matt Sullivan; Rick Quatro
Subject: Maximum number of variables in FM?

Hi Matt, Rick, and Everyone,

What the maximum number of user variables that can be created in FM 8?  The FM help says that the maximum number of characters in a variable definition is 255, but does not specify the maximum number of variables.  

Thanks,
Diane