Searching Instruction Chains

I periodically hear the comment “The scanner utility in EditPro is really cool, but I sure wish it could search for every occurrence of a command or a variable.”  Well the scanner utility is cool, and it can’t scan for a command or variable.  The good news is that there is a way to do just that.  You just have to take a couple of minutes to make a search file.  Now the procedure I’m going to tell you won’t detect the occurrence of commands or variables when they exist directly on a zone, but this is not as much of a problem as you might think.  After all, how many applications have a Close Check command on a button, or require the Dollar3 variable be left alone, without an instruction chain involved somewhere.
How It’s Done

  1. In EditPro, display the alphabetically first chain.
  2. Press Ctl-F7 to start a macro.
  3. Press Alt-F, then P to select the print option.
  4. Press Backspace at least a dozen times or more to make sure that the macro backs out whatever may pop up in that window.
  5. Type CHAINS.LST (or whatever filename you wish to use) and push Enter.
  6. Press Ctl-Page Down to select the next chain.
  7. Press Ctl-F7 to terminate the macro.
  8. Now press Ctl-F8 repeatedly until you have cycled through the alphabetically last chain.
  9. Exit EditPro and view CHAINS.LST with Edit if you are in DOS, or Notepad if you are in Windows.
  10. Now use the search capability to locate the command or variable in question.

Why It Works

EditPro actually prints by making a file with the image to be printed, then ‘copying’ that file to the selected printer port.  If a destination file name is substituted for the port, EditPro faithfully copies the image file to the destination file.  This is a pretty neat feature in itself, but EditPro still has one more trick up its proverbial sleeve.  If the destination file already exists, EditPro will append the new data instead of overwriting the original file.  So when the macro repeatedly writes to the same file name, each instruction chain listing gets appended onto the end.  When you have run the macro for every chain, you will end up with a single file containing a listing of every instruction chain.