Figuring Out What Variables to Use

aPriori spreadsheet reports provide access to so many formulas and functions that it can be difficult to know what variable name to call for a particular value. These also tend to change from release to release, so any attempt to maintain a static reference list would quickly become obsolete. The most practical way to find the formula value that you want to use is to run a report that returns ALL formulas and functions. If necessary to identify the variable name for a specific value, you can temporarily set the value to something unique, run the report, search the report for that unique value, and identify the column under which it appears.

Here is an example of a report that will return all formulas and functions for a given part.

Note: This report can take a long time to execute if run against a large, complex part, or against many parts. Experiment with small parts first. Also, the report can return so many columns that Excel may display an "Unreadable content" error message when you open the spreadsheet. This error can be ignored.

Also note the "templatePath" specifier in the <reports> tag. You easily can create a blank template file by saving an empty Excel spreadsheet as an .xlsm file. (For the purposes of this exercise, you don't need a real template.) Make sure that you save this blank template file in the specified folder, and that the name of the file exactly matches the name specified in the templatePath.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<reports traverseAssemblies="true" templatePath="templates\All aPriori Variables-template.xlsm">
<CostModelWatchpoints sheetName="ap_output" isLeaf="true" hasChildren="false" revisitScenarios="true" generateOneRowPerAttribute="false" suppressRollups="false" >
<Node name="*" suppressZeros="false">
<CSL getAllFormulas="true" getAllFunctions="true">
</CSL>
</Node>
</CostModelWatchpoints>
</reports>