Question on SKY 8 macros and running on grouped entries

[Alan Bowman]

Hello everyone, 

Before I ask the longer question, I'll ask the easy question: 

This is for SKY 8. 

I created a macro in SKY using the Macro Manager. I needed to run this macro on multiple entries. I grouped the entries, and tried to run the macro on all the entries at the same time. This did not work.  I ended up having to run the macro on every entry in the group one at a time by using the down arrow to move to the next entry, running the macro, using the down arrow, running the macro... 

Question: Should it have worked? If not, now I know. But if it should have worked then I may have some questions to try and figure out what I did wrong. 

Thanks,

 Alan 

[Jochen Fassbender]

Hello Alan,

As far as I know macros don't simultaneously work on multiple records in
both SKY 8 and 7. Note that you should distinguih between records and
entries. Even though all of the records in your group could belong to
different entries (= main entries), this does not necessarily have to be
the case.

One little improvement of your macro would be to integrate {down} at the
end of the macro, so as to avoid having to use the down arrow manually
for going to the next record each time. This way you just have to click
the macro as many times as you need.

But there is no instruction for macros how often they should run (if
there is, I'd like to know), nor is there something like {end of group}
equivalent to the EOF command in programming languages. So one should be
careful not to create a macro which triggers an infinite loop.

Even though one can do a lot of things with SKY macros, they are not
equivalent to a full-fledged programming language.

Jochen

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[Alan Bowman]

Jochen, 

Thanks for the explanation. At least now I know that it works how it works, and not how I wanted it to work. Which, sadly, is a good metaphor for life in general. 

I found the {DOWN} macro code about half-way through, and adding that to my existing macro made the work faster. 

I can see how learning macros outside of SKY would be useful. ASI has a course on those, so I'm adding that to my list. 

Thank you,

 Alan