General functions
Overview
The Evaluate function treats input text as an expression to be parsed and evaluated.
The GetEnv function returns the value of specified environment variable.
The Min and Max functions find the smallest or largest value in a list of values.
Evaluate
Interprets text as an expression to be parsed and evaluated.
Syntax
Evaluate( text )
The required argument text may be of any type, but the input text is interpreted as a literal expression. The returned value is text, regardless of the natural type of the expression. Any errors encountered while parsing the expression will result in an <Error> value on output, and parsing error messages will be sent to the message log.
Remarks
This function is useful for building dynamic operations from data stored in a file or database. If you use the Evaluate() function to repeatedly evaluate the same input text in a Calculate tool expression, overriding the tool's default Evaluate() cache size setting may improve performance.
Example
Evaluate("lowercase(NAME)")
returns the results of the expression lowercase( NAME )
.
GetEnv
Returns the value of specified environment variable.
Syntax
GetEnv( environmentvariable )
The required argument environmentvariable is the name of a local environmental variable. The returned value is text.
Remarks
This function searches the environment list to find the specified environment variable, and returns its value as a string.
Example
IF system.OS = "windows" THEN GetEnv("HOMEPATH")
ELSE GetEnv("HOME")
ENDIF
This returns the home directory of the user.
Min
Accept two or more arguments and returns the smallest of all the arguments.
Syntax
Min( value1, value2, ... valueN )
The required arguments value1 and value2 may be of any type, but all types must be comparable. For example, Integers and Floating Point types are comparable, but Text and Date types are not..
Remarks
Null and Error values are not compared.
Max
Accept two or more arguments and returns the largest of all the arguments.
Syntax
Max( value1, value2, ... valueN )
The required arguments value1 and value2 may be of any type, but all types must be comparable. For example, Integers and Floating Point types are comparable, but Text and Date types are not..
Remarks
Null and Error values are not compared.