Having the basic navigation and output in place for our example generator, we can now extend the original requirements by reporting the number of time units provided by each Display into our spec sheet. To do this, we need a count variable, a new loop and some arithmetic. With the modifications our example generator will appear as follows:

01 SpecSheet()
02 _translators()
03 'SpecSheet for ' id newline newline
04 foreach >Watch
05 { 'Watch: ' id newline
06   do .Display
07   { '  Number of time units shown: '
08     @count = '0'
09     do :UnitZones { @count++%null }
10     @count newline
11     '  Buttons: '
12     do :Buttons { id ' ' }
13     newline
14   }
15   do .LogicalWatch
16   { '  Apps: '
17     do decompositions
18     { foreach .State [Watch] { id ' ' } }
19     newline
20   }
21   newline
22 }

The code that counts and outputs the number of time units can be found in lines 7 – 10. After outputting the header text in line 7, we define a local variable called count and initialize it to zero in line 8. Like everything in MERL, this is really just a string rather than a number, but we can interpret it as a number when we want. The @ prefix means this is a local variable, whose value is visible only throughout this generator; a global variable is prefixed with a $ and is visible throughout all generators in a given execution run.

In line 9, we loop through the elements in the UnitZone property collection. However, instead of retrieving and outputting any property values we will now just simply increment our counter on each iteration. The command for this:

@count++%null

takes the @count variable, increases it by one and — instead of printing the old value of $count — throws away the output with the %null translator. This output reformatter comes from a set of standard translators that come as part of MetaEdit+’s generator development environment. In order to be able to use these translators, a subgenerator defining them is called at the beginning of the generator in line 2 (we will see more translators in action shortly). After all the iterations the variable @count will then hold the number of available time unit slots. This number will then be output (followed by a newline command) in line 10.

Having completed the basic functionality of our example generator, we will now see how to refine it further, starting with outputting to a file.