If you routinely set all of your variables to a reset time of “automatically” and your formula variables are all set to calculate “as needed” in Dialogue you could be creating a maintenance nightmare for you and your colleagues. Take your Dialogue knowledge to the next level and take control of formula calculation timing and variable reset timing.

One of the great things about Dialogue is how often stuff “just works”. None more so than when you tell Dialogue to calculate your formula variables “As Needed” and to reset them “automatically”. The problem with this approach is that you don’t have any control or to be honest, any idea when those calculations will take place. If your application is straightforward then you probably won’t have any problems but if you’re trying to generate complex reports, or you have a lot of interdependent variables to calculate you could be heading for some unpredictable results.

Having too many formula variables can degrade application performance as well, one formula variable that calculates/sets twenty user variables is much more efficient than twenty formula variables each setting a single user variable.

The key to all of this is understanding the timing of the various events that take place in a typical engine run. Do yourself a favour, dig out the “troubleshooting.pdf” from the documentation folder and have a read of the Engine Timing Chapter. Once you get your head around the order Dialogue processes the various objects in your application you’ll have a much better understanding of what’s going on under the covers.