Owner's Manual (Complete)
Chapter 21—Design Tools
4 The Home Control Assistant
2. Click the OK button to close this dialog box.
HCA updates the properties of the chosen device, program, or group, and the inventory dialog
box reflects these changes.
Hint: Remember that changing the X10 settings for a device only changes your design as
managed by HCA. You still need to make the corresponding changes on the module itself.
Program Flag Inventory
As explained in the chapter on programs, there are objects in HCA that you create that have both a
name and a value. These objects are called flags. In a traditional programming language they
would be called variables.
All the flags in an HCA design can be seen and managed in a dialog accessed by checking the
“Flag Inventory” checkbox in the
Home ribbon category.
This dialog can be left open while you perform other actions with HCA and the value of each flag
updates as programs that reference them are executed. If you want to temporarily stop the display
from updating, click on the push-pin icon in the lower left corner of the screen. When the dialog is
pinned, no updates happen to the display. Click it again to resume having the dialog update.
This dialog contains these parts:
A list of all flags in your design with their name and current value.
Information about the currently selected flag’s value
A list of all programs that use this flag.
When the program flag inventory dialog is open you can modify the value of any flag by selecting
its name in the list then changing its value in the value edit box, and pressing the Update button.
What you place in the value edit box need not be a simple thing like 100, Yes or "abc" – it can be
an expression. The expression is evaluated and the result is assigned to the flag. This is an easy
way to immediately see the effect of what an expression evaluates to. Enter the expression in the
value edit box and press the update button.
When HCA is shutdown the value each flags is saved as part of the state file (see the chapter on
Restart). If you want you can have HCA, when started, read that file and assign the last values of
your flags back to them or upon startup just assign a given value to them. For each flag you can
specify what to do and that selection is also made in this dialog.
To remove a flag from your design, use the Delete button. You can't delete a flag unless it is no
longer referenced by any program