Can I get the attributes of an element in the "application modeller" programmatically from my VBO?

[ChristopherRoja]

Hello People, 

Hope you are doing great.

I just face a challenge that I would like to resolve in an efficient way, I use the app modeller in a VBO to map the fields of a Mainframe application (some windows containing some different fields), it is basically the same attributes but they change the position X and Y, so operations like Read and Write can be easily archived by having one extra generic element with dynamic values that uses Start X, Start Y, End X and End Y. 

With that introduction, I am wondering if somehow I can programmatically read the attributes of the elements I have defined in the application modeller from the VBO where they reside, to get those values for example and them reuse them accordingly, instead of repeating a simple Read/Write operation per element.

Is this even possible? Any suggestions on how to resolve this in any other way?

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Christopher Rojas
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[david.l.morris]

I'm not totally sure I understand. Are you wanting the values to be stored as a constant from day to day, or are you saying you want it to dynamically find these during each session and store the values in order to be used by various actions?

As for programmatically reading the attributes of an element, I don't think there's any way to do that without perhaps retrieving the XML from the database and then parsing the XML for what you need. As I said, I'm probably not understanding your need, so I may be way off. But could you store the values in data items and then retrieve the values when you need them and use in dynamic attributes? If you need to store the values for more than just a single session, then maybe store the values in work queue items? I know that's a common thing people do when needing to retain dynamic values from session to session or day to day.

Small edit: When I say 'I don't think it's possible to programmatically read the attributes of an element', I guess I was assuming you already knew about using a Read stage to read the values of an attribute at runtime. You can do that, but I think it'd only work for an element that can be found in the app at that moment in order to read from the app. I don't think you can read the static values stored in the app model, if that makes sense. Hopefully I didn't just make this more confusing.

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Dave Morris
3Ci @ Southern Company
Atlanta, GA
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