Declarations and assignments in the initiation section apply throughout the template. In the initiation section, one parameter is declared,
activity_name
, which can be assigned via a special form before template execution. This is the name of the activity for which the interface report is to be generated. In addition, two variables are declared:
●st
- The status code returned by the database extraction function
●act
- The ID of the activity for which the report is producedThe body of the initiation section has only one statement between the
BEGIN
andEND
keywords. This is an assignment statement that assigns the activity’s ID to theact
variable. Because elements are identified in database extraction functions by their IDs and not their names, you must first find the ID for the activity before you can extract information about it. To do this, use the activity’s name as an argument in a database extraction function that returns the corresponding activity’s ID. By assigning this ID to theact
variable, you can later use it throughout the template whenever you want to extract information about the activity.