Use of arrays as parameters and as RECORD elements

Robot Controller
1

Hi,

I’m looking to do some fairly extensive manipulation of arrays in RAPID, and it would be a whole lot tidier if I could do things such as:

Passing an array as a parameter to a Proc/Func;
Declare an array as part of a RECORD or
Redimension an existing array, i.e. change its size.

Can’t find anything in the RAPID manual on the subject, and running possible syntax through the syntax checker has only given negative results.

Any thoughts?

2

Passing an array as a parameter to a Proc/Func;

Yes you can do this:

PROC myTest(num myNum{*})
!do something
ENDPROC

Declare an array as part of a RECORD

No, but the record can consist of other record types that could represent an array-like type:

RECORD comp1
num n1;
num n2;
num n3;
ENDRECORD

RECORD myRec
comp1 c1;
bool bBool;
ENDRECORD

You could probably come up with some method using late-binding to fill in the elements of comp1 using a loop.

Redimension an existing array, i.e. change its size.

I don’t think this is possible

3

Thanks for that - the paragraph on sending a parameter looks useful, I hadn’t tried putting a star in the curly brackets!

One more thing - can I use an array as a return value from a func?

4

Unfortunately, this is not possible, as described in section 5.4 of the RAPID Kernel reference:

Functions can have (return) any value data type (including any available installed type). A function cannot be dimensioned, i.e. a function cannot return an array value.

5

[QUOTE=Cypherspaceman]One more thing - can I use an array as a return value from a func?
[/QUOTE]You can pass the array as an INOUT parameter to the func. That way you can still modify it.