Recognition limit (General tab of the Screens tab)

The recognition limit is not an attribute in the begin tag of the <screen> element but rather a separate element (the <recolimit> element) that optionally can occur inside a <screen> element, on the same level as the <description>, <actions>, and <nextscreens> elements.

The Set Recognition Limit checkbox and the Screens Before Error input field are located on the General tab of the Screens tab (see Figure 1). By default the Set Recognition limit checkbox is cleared and the input field is disabled. If you select the checkbox, then the Macro Editor sets the default value of the Screens Before Error input field to 100. You can set the value to a larger or smaller quantity.

The recognition limit allows you to take some sort of action if the macro runtime processes a particular macro screen too many times. If the macro runtime does process the same macro screen a large number of times (such as 100), then the reason is probably that an error has occurred in the macro and that the macro is stuck in an endless loop.

When the recognition limit is reached, the macro runtime either terminates the macro with an error message (this is the default action) or starts processing another macro screen that you specify.

You should notice that the recognition limit applies to one particular screen and that by default it is absent. You can specify a recognition limit for any macro screen, and you can specify the same or a different recognition limit value for each macro screen in which you include it.