Blend functions

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This is a wayfinding article on Blend functions in the USoft Community Knowledge Base.

You can call most of the functionality in USoft Blend by placing Blend directives in your scripts. These act as commands and are comparable to commands in a Powershell script. The following example script contains 2 Blend directives. The first is a command to create Authorizer tables. The second is a command to fill the tables with data found in an external file.

<example xmlns:pc="Processing.Command">
  <pc:Creapp application="USAUTH" ... />
  <pc:XmlImport alias="x1" commit="commit" source="c:\example\USAUTH.xml"/>
</example>

Some of the functionality of USoft Blend is available by calling Blend functions instead.

Functionally, the main difference between directives and functions is syntax. With directives, you pass parameters in XML attributes, that is, by name:

<pc:Creapp application="USAUTH"... />

With directives, you pass parameters comma-separated between parentheses, that is, by position:

variable:Set('envxml', files:XmlFile('env.xml'))

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Technically, functions are responsible for actually executing USoft Blend. Directives are offered as wrappers around the most popular functions so they can be integrated more easily in Blend scripts.

The pc:evaluate directive lets you wrap a function in a directive:

<pc:evaluate select="variable:Set('envxml', files:XmlFile('env.xml'))"/>

For an alphabetical list of Blend functions, go here.

For an alphabetical list of Blend directives, go here.

For an introduction to USoft Blend, go to Introducing Blend scripts.

For a functional overview, go to Understanding USoft Blend.