Viewing and determining the configuration variables

Original Article Date: March  2004

Updated:  March 2012

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.

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 several on-line resources to see what variables are available to MicroStation. Among them are the following:

Complete List of MicroStation V8's Configuration Variables

Configuration Variables in MicroStation V8 (2004 Edition, V8.0 and V8.1)

MicroStation v8i Variables [TN]

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 filescalled cfgvars.txt and cfglong.txt.  In earlier versions of MicroStation, these files will be created in MicroStation' s root folder.  In MicroStation v8i, the files can be found in the same folder as the open design file.

cfgvars.txt conains a lengthy list of data showing various bits of information including: the variable name, the variable type, and a short description. cfglong.txt is similar except that it contains longer descriptions.

Related Tip:

Show all 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