Initializing help system before first use

Configuration with Annotations

Annotations provide a way of including metadata in the model to configure the way in which the model and its entities are manipulated by the system.

Annotations are simply metadata expressed in the model source file that is retained in the resulting BIM file after compilation. A full annotation name is expressed as <category>.<name> where a category is a mechanism to group a set of annotations and other categories. Xpress Insight annotations belong to the insight category.

Declaring Annotations

In the Mosel source file, annotations are included in special comments—a single line annotation is of the form: 
!@<category>.<name> <value>
Among other things, annotations give you the potential to define aliases for Mosel entities, so that they are presented in the user interface using their alias names, rather than their original model names. For example, placing the following annotation prior to the frac declaration in the example: 
!@insight.alias Outcomes
frac: array(SHARES) of mpvar
sets an alias name that will be used in place of the entity name throughout the user interface.

Entity Role Annotation

Annotations can also inform the system if an entity is an input or a result. Xpress Insight defaults to assuming that entities of primitive types are input entities and mpvar/linctr entities are result entities. However, there are often times, when, say, certain primitive entities are intended as results, in which case they should be annotated.

The following snippet annotates the frac entity as a result (although in this case, as frac is an mpvar, it is not strictly necessary) using the insight.manage annotation: 
!@insight.manage result
frac: array(SHARES) of mpvar

Annotation Reference

See the Xpress Insight Mosel Interface Reference Manual for further detailed information about the many available Mosel annotations.

Covered Topics
  • Basic Presentation Customizations for Entities
    Earlier, a model was loaded into the Xpress Insight application with the minimal required changes. Once deployed, the named entities in the model are presented to the user unchanged, and anonymous entities in the model are not visible.
Parent Topic Fundamental Xpress Insight Concepts