Variables in the Rule Processor

The Rule Processor application treats any character string that begins with an ampersand sign (&) as a variable.

Variable names can be up to 32 characters long, excluding the ampersand sign (&). The variable values can be up to 255 characters long.

Two types of variables can be used in Rules:

• SHARED variables from the BBI-SS PAS SHARED variable pool

• EVENT variables created by the Rule Processor application; they exist for duration of the event

  EVENT variables consist of

  • WORDxxx variables, where xxx represents a number (for example, &WORD4 represents the fourth word of the message text)
  • BMC AMI Ops Automation-supplied variables

See BMC-AMI-Ops-Automation-supplied-EVENT-variables for a list of EVENT variables.

Restrictions for long variables

Long variables cannot be used in Rules processing.

None of the Rule event types, including the VAR event type, support the use of long variables and the Rule Processor panels do not support long variables in any field.

Resolving variables

When resolving the contents of variables:

• The variable names and the variable values are always converted to uppercase.

• Conversion operations are performed.

  If the variables contain numeric values, conversion operations are performed automatically. For example, if you have two variables where &ABC=5 and &DEF=0005, these both equal 5.

  Variable values can also contain combinations of numerics and characters. When numerics and characters are combined, the conversion operation is different. For example, if you have two variables where &ABC=XYZ0005 and &DEF=XYZ5, these values are not equal.

• The following search order is used:

  1. BBI-SS PAS SHARED variables
  2. EVENT variables (WORDxxx variables and BMC AMI Ops Automation-supplied variables)

  Variables that are not found result in a null value (zero length).

  For example, if the SHARED variable pool contains a variable named &WORD1, the value from the SHARED pool is used instead of the actual first word of the event text.

When the Rule Processor resolves the contents of variables, the Rule Processor accepts two styles of variable specifications: simple variables (formerly referred to as CLIST-style) and compound variables.

Simple variables

When an ampersand sign (&) prefixes text in a field in the Rule Processor fields, it denotes a simple variable name. The end of a variable name is designated by one of the following symbols:

For example, the variable &MSGID contains the characters IEF1234I and the variable &TEST contains the characters ABCD and the combination

is resolved as two separate variables:

Compound variables

When an ampersand sign (&) prefixes text in a field in the Rule Processor fields, it denotes a simple variable name that is resolved in one pass.

If the ampersand sign is directly followed by an exclamation mark (!) and if there are periods in the variable name, the Rule Processor resolves the contents of the compound variable differently.

The first node of a compound variable precedes the first period and is called the stem. For example, in the variable &!ABC.MYNAME, the stem is ABC.

The stem of a compound variable is not resolved to a value and two passes are used to resolve the variable.

In another example, suppose you have the following three variables and values: