Document Assembly

The DECREMENT and INCREMENT instructions are relatively new to HotDocs and they serve identical, but reversed purposes.  DECREMENT will reduce a given number variable by one, whereas INCREMENT will increase by one.

These two instructions are most useful in conjunction with WHILE and REPEAT instructions.  Lets say we are doing some real estate templates and one of the templates is ONLY required where there are one or more corporate borrowers. To do this, we could just use a TF variable that is set to TRUE if there is at least one corporate borrower, but that isn’t as useful as knowing exactly how many corporate borrowers we have.  Making MORE specific information available to your system is nearly always better than “the shortest approach”.

SET BORR Corporate CNT TO 0 //our var to store how many corporate borrowers
REPEAT BORROWERS RPT
IF BORRS Corporate TF = TRUE //a checkbox on the dialog if the borrower is a company
INCREMENT BORR Corporate CNT
END IF
END REPEAT

And that’s it.  At the end of this, BORR Corporate CNT will contain the number of corporate borrowers we have.  The same usage would apply in a WHILE statement, except that in a WHILE loop, it is nearly always imperative that you have an INCREMENT (or DECREMENT) statement.  The reason for this is that REPEAT will auto terminate when you have finished the repeated answers whereas WHILE does not – YOU must manually code that ‘cut out’.  And that’s where INCREMENT comes in.

At the end of the day, INCREMENT and DECREMENT could already be achieved in HotDocs scripting as follows:

INCREMENT: SET Variable NU TO Variable NU + 1
DECREMENT: SET Variable NU TO Variable NU - 1

Both of these would work. But these two new instructions are cleaner and easier to type.  And lets face it – convenience and clean code are pretty cool things to have.

The HotDocs DEBUG instruction model is very simple, very powerful and very clear about its use.  DEBUG is used to…well, debug!  If you have templates or computations that are producing unexpected or incorrect output, using the DEBUG instruction may get you back on track just a little quicker.

There are two uses of DEBUG – in templates and in scripts (both Dialog scripts and computations).  Both uses have a very similar effect.

By placing a DEBUG instruction in your template or script, you tell HotDocs to display the Debugger screen.  With the debugger, you can manually step through a script or template while viewing extremely detailed information regarding each variable’s value.  You can add variables to watch lists, “step” the script (ie: manually tell HotDocs to progress the script line by line) and watch the variable values change with each step.  Using DEBUG, you can quickly identify what data is coming in/going out and what data is changing.  This will allow you to track down any errors quickly, as you can not only assess each computation or variable, but also the variable values that went into creating the problematic data.

Additionally, the Debugger contains a processing stack tab.  This is a sequential list of templates and components to be processed, in order.  It will also give you the reason as to WHY HotDocs has a particular item in the queue.

In the most general sense, the Debugger gives you a real look under the hood as to exacty how HotDocs is handling/treating your code.  This is invaluable if you simply cannot make your code produce the correct content.

A very brief HotDocs tip today – the CONCEAL and OMIT instruction models.  These two commands make working with HotDocs dialogs as answer sources a little cleaner and easier for users to work with.

In short, CONCEAL keeps a variable from showing in the “Select from Answer Source” dialog – it is simply hidden from the user, allowing for the more meaningful fields to be shown only.  OMIT does a similar thing, but hides a variable from the user in the “Edit Answer Source” dialog box – again, allowing only the meaningful fields to show to the user.

These two commands go hand in hand to pare down information that displays in dialog answer source manipulation.  Rather than trying to show an example, these two commands are best “tinkered” with on a case by case basis.  If you want to try something cool, try using dialog answer sources in a scenario where only ONE variable is not CONCEALed.  The variable still showing should be an identifier, such as a name or similar.  That way, a user will simply see a nice drop down to pick from and all the other data will ‘appear out of nowhere’ – just like magic!

This stuff is super simple and takes about 10 minutes to master.  Play around with dialog answer sources, CONCEAL and OMIT – it may actually be FUN.

Unfortunately, the CLEAR instruction model doesn’t really have any use on its own.  Its job is simple: to remove all the options and option prompts from the specified multiple choice (“MC”) variable.  That’s it.  When used in conjunction with the ADD instruction (which adds options & option prompts to a specified MC variable), you end up with a pair of commands that can dynamically build MC variables on the fly, based on whatever data you desire.

For the sake of this example, lets say we are drafting real estate documents.  We have BORROWERS RPT, which collects information on…well, borrowers!  We have BORRS Full Name CO which constructs the full name of each individual borrower (ie: can only be used inside the repeat).  Lastly, we have BORRS Guaranteed MS, which is a multi select MC variable which asks which borrowers have guarantors.  Here’s how we’d build our BORRS Guaranteed MS variable:

CLEAR BORRS Guaranteed MS
ASK NONE
REPEAT BORROWERS RPT
ADD "«BORRS Name Full CO»" TO BORRS Guaranteed MS
END REPEAT
ASK DEFAULT

That’s it.  We firstly clear the MC variable, then inside an ASK NONE/ASK DEFAULT pair, we add the full name of each borrower to the MC variable.  The user may now select borrower names from the MC variable for insertion into the template.  In conjunction with the list format applied to the variable, you can quickly and easily generate user-specified lists of any data from any repeat you have in your system.

There are far more uses for CLEAR/ADD, but this covers what we consider to be the most useful one.