When a variable is needed at submission time, it is first sought in the task itself. If it is not found in the task, it is sought from the task's parent and so on, up through the node levels until found. For any node, there are two places to look for variables. The user-defined variables are looked for first, and then any generated variables.
At present, an undefined variable causes a task to abort immediately, without submitting a job. ecflow_ui will display this failure in the info-window.
Example of Variable inheritance
suite x
edit TOPLEVEL 10
edit MIDDLE 10
edit LOWER 10
family f
edit MIDDLE 20
task t
edit LOWER abc
task t2
endfamily
family f2
edit TOPLEVEL 40
task z
endfamily
endsuite
This would produce the following results:
Table 4 1 Results of variable inheritance
Command | task t | Task t2 | task z |
echo TOPLEVEL %TOPLEVEL% | 10 | 10 | 40 |
echo MIDDLE %MIDDLE% | 20 | 20 | 10 |
echo LOWER %LOWER% | abc | 10 | 10 |