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For the new CAD Administrator, this article will help you locate and view the configuration variables available in MicroStation....after that, you'll learn how to determine what your variables are. 2006-08-15 Corrected speling error. Added link to tip.
The MicroStation environment is defined by things called configuration variables which is an item seen by MicroStation as a unique name that provides definition of where things are found, stored, and named. Viewing variables: There are many resources available to see what variables are available to MicroStation. Among them are the following: Complete List of Configuration Variables Configuration Variables in MicroStation V8 (2004 Edition, V8.0 and V8.1) Another cool way of determining what variables are available to MicroStation is to keyin the following while in a design file: Mdl load cfgvars printCfgVarResource Note that this keyin is case sensitive and must be keyed in exactly as shown above. In doing so MicroStation will create two files in it's root program folder called cfgvars.txt and cfglong.txt. Opening the first file will reveal a lengthy list of data showing various bits of information including: the variable name, the variable type, and a short description. The second file is similar except that it contains longer descriptions. Related Tip: Show all configuration variables, not just some!
Determine your variables: A quick and easy way to see what variables have been defined for the active workspace is go to Workspace > Configuration and take a peek at the resulting dialog:
In the graphic above we can easily see that the variable called MS_MACRO is used to define the location of macros. We can also see that in this case the variable is pointing to the following folders: c:\program files\bentley\workspace\system\macros\ c:\program files\bentley\workspace\standards\macros\ d:\production\macros\ Another method of viewing variable definitions is to locate and open one of the configuration files used by MicroStation. For example, upon opening a User Configuration File with any text based editor you may see stuff like this:
Lastly, to get a listing of what variables are being used and how they've been defined on your installation of MicroStation, follow these steps. Right-Click your MicroStation icon Append -debug to the target field. For a typical installation on Windows XP, it will read: "C:\Program Files\Bentley\Program\MicroStation\ustation.exe" -debug Start MicroStation This will build the following file which contains a listing of all variables and their definitions: ...\Program\MicroStation\msdebug.txt
Once you've run a debug report, don't forget to remove the -debug switch from the MicroStation icon.
AskInga Article #195