Start Loop activity properties

In addition to the General and Triggers pages, the Properties dialog box for a Start Loop activity contains a Start Loop page.

You can have a numeric loop (where you define a counter, a limit, and an increment value), or a List loop (where you perform the loop once for each item in a list). You can pass the current value of the counter as a parameter into the stages within your loop in the form stage_label.$Counter, where stage_label is the name of the Start Loop activity stage as given in the Diagram window. You mark the end of a loop with an End Loop Activity stage, which has a link drawn back to its corresponding Start Loop stage.

You can nest loops if required.

You define the loop setting in the Start Loop page. The page contains:

• Loop type. Choose Numeric to implement a For...Next type loop, or List to implement a For...Each type loop.

When you choose Numeric, the page contains the following fields:

• From. The initialization value for the counter.
• Step. The increment value for the counter.
• To. The final counter value.

You can use parameters for any of these, and specify actual values at run time. You can click the Browse button to open the External Parameter Helper, which shows you all parameters available at this point in the job sequence. Parameters entered in this field needs to be delimited with hashes (#). Parameters selected from the External Parameter Helper will automatically be enclosed in hash symbols.

When you choose List, the page has different fields:

• Delimited values. Enter your list with each item separated by the selected delimiter.
• Delimiter. Specify the delimiter that will separate your list items. Choose from:
  • Comma (the default)
  • Space
  • Other (enter the required character in the text field)