MOD2000: How to Edit Large Workflow Scripts (248090)

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Microsoft Script Editor is available with Microsoft Office 2000. An advantage of using an alternate editor is that you can save a copy of your workflow script into a file. You can use this file to track changes to your workflow script in a source code control system.

By default, Microsoft Script Editor is installed on demand. If you click the Microsoft Script Editor command in Access, Access prompts you to install the Microsoft Script Editor if it is not already installed.

Adding Microsoft Script Editor to Your Installation

1. Start Microsoft Office 2000 Setup.
2. When you see the list of components, expand the Office Tools node.
3. Click the HTML Source Editing node, and click Run all from My Computer.
4. Click Update Now to install the components.

Starting Microsoft Script Editor After You Install Microsoft Office 2000

Follow these steps to open the current data access page source in Microsoft Script Editor.

1. Create a new data access page in Design view.
2. On the Tools menu, point to Macro, and then click Microsoft Script Editor.

NOTE: You can also start Microsoft Script Editor by running Mse.exe, which is usually installed into the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\IDE\IDE98 folder.

Editing Workflow Script in Microsoft Script Editor

1. On the File menu, click New File.
2. Create a new HTML page.
3. Switch to the Access Workflow Designer Shared Script tab on the development computer. Place the focus on the pointer in the text window.
4. On the Edit menu, click Select All. Then, click Copy on the Edit menu.
5. Switch back to Microsoft Script Editor. Place the focus on the pointer in the text window.
6. On the Edit menu, click Select All.
7. On the Edit menu, click Paste.

Microsoft Script Editor does not automatically perform syntax color coding and Intellisense on the text unless it finds the HTML <SCRIPT> tags surrounding the code. To get the script editor to recognize the text as script, you can enter the following lines at the top and bottom of the text:

'<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=VBSCRIPT>
.
.
your script goes here
.
.
'</SCRIPT>
				

NOTE: The apostrophes ('), which are comment characters for VBScript, are important. Without the apostrophes, which embed the HTML tags in comments, HTML tags will cause workflow script errors. After you have entered these embedded HTML tags, Microsoft Script Editor can perform syntax color coding on the workflow script and can also perform limited Intellisense support.

NOTE: Although Microsoft Script Editor may perform statement completion for the Document Object Model and other browser-related objects, these objects are not available in workflow script, and you should not use them.

When you are finished editing workflow script, you can paste the text back into Access Workflow Designer.

IMPORTANT: Do not add new actions while you are editing workflow script in another editor because the script procedures created for the new actions may be erased when you paste the code back into Access Workflow Designer.