Mapping of variables

The basic actions for connecting or disconnecting variables are listed below:

• Single mapping Single mapping : select a single variable (either input or output) and double click on a second (opposing) variable to create a mapping. Each time the output-variable (on the left) changes value, it is written (and converted if necessary) to the linked input-variable (on the right).

• Multiple mapping Multiple mapping : select multiple input-variables (on the right) and double click on a single output-variable (on the left) to write one output to multiple inputs.

• Autoconnect: you can try to automatically connect variables by pressing the corresponding button at the bottom of the variable mapping interface. This will iterate through the output-variables and try to map them to the most similar input variable according to their names (or input variables, if there are several identical ones). For measuring the similarity the Levenshtein distance is used, which calculates the amount of steps necessary for transforming one name into another (e.g. deleting, adding, exchanging letters). As numbers are most likely explicit identifiers, the transformation of numbers is excluded in this calculation. The maximum allowed difference for autoconnecting can be defined using the menu entry Minimum autoconnect similarity (see Options section). Note that this will undo all previously done mappings.

• Deselecting: to deselect a single variable inside a variable list, click this variable again holding SHIFT or simply select another variable. To deselect all selected variables inside a list, click in an unpopulated area of the list. To deselect all selected variables, click in the area between both variable lists.

• Disconnecting: to disconnect a connected variable just double click on one of the partners.

Figure 49: Example of sorted variable mappings