Ventana software support forum

I don't think this is necessary. You can just write: parent.attribute = if ( a<b ) { invoker.otherAttrib } else {parent.attribute} to set the attribute to itself if the condition is false. That’s the first step I tried, over and over, first with normal and then with shadow variables. No effect. So ...

Hi Tom. Thought I would update you on my progress. After lots of struggles with learning Ventity and then implementing the model design, I came the realization that while Ventity makes the easy stuff easy, it makes the hard stuff hard. Back on March 31, I noticed that for the last few days, I was sp...

Good news. Thinking about this further and lessons learned from previous bugs, I looked for an undeleted atribute for the attribute in question, before I changed it to a shadow. I found it, deleted it, and now the model sets the attribute appropriately. "0" no longer appears in Equation Li...

Another head-scratching puzzle. Something is setting an attribute to “0”. I can even remove the one place where’s set, and it’s still set to “0”. I’m using an attribute instead of a stock for a boolean 1 or 0, due to the awkwardness and diagram clutter of changing stock values with flows and an inpu...

Thanks once again. I appreciate your style, showing and explaining the problems you find, rather than solving the problem. That maximizes learning! I noticed you had shadow variables and my version of the model didn't. First I deleted two undeleted items. This made almost no difference, still got ab...

A small question. What is the logical operator for "or"? The one for and is "&&".

We have a clue. See the table for Media Meme. Action G5_2 Create News Org MMs calls action G5_3 Create News Org MMs for One Politician, which adds five records to Media Meme, all for the same politician. Only the first has Politician set. The rest are empty. Is it possible that Ventity is somehow lo...

No, and it refers to none. It is indeed a puzzle, a head scratcher, and an enigma! I also tried setting it with a shadow variable.

Thanks. Are we looking at the same diagram? "source type" is nowhere on News Org action G5_2 Create News Org MMs. See the image.

The especially odd thing is temp politician truthfulness IS being set.

This is a two-hour puzzle. See News Org action G5_2 Create News Org MMs . The value of Invoker.temp PoliticianID is never set, as seen in the News Orgs results table. This causes many warnings. Compare this to Voter action G3_1 Create Politician Comparison which also sets a temporary attribute value...

Gosh thanks, Tom. I didn't think to connect politician supported to the trigger. I thought triggers were different from variables. The help doc for Actions, Triggers shows no arrows leading to the the trigger. That politician supported was underlined did not ring a bell with me that it needs an arro...

Thanks for your help! Ventity continues to be the right tool for this project. I can think of no other that would work, short of a mountain of code. The problem is on entity Voter in action Step 4 SP Accommodation. Its Trigger If is set to: politician supported != "". This looks fine, and ...

I emailed you a nightly build that runs OK for me and handles many of the generated code errors. v4.9 still causes errors on my model. I'm using v4.8 and doing fine. To minimize overloading you with lots of small problems, I will wait for a future version and try that. There is no setting for refer...

I see Ventity supports empty foreign keys. But if they are empty, I get one warning for each entity. I’m getting 9 identical warnings every time I run the model, even though model output is fine: Runtime voter. politician_supported [0] Unable to reference Entity Type [politician] from voter [voter[V...

Ventity continues to be a joy to use on a very hard problem, democratic backsliding. The model is evolving well. Ventity is able to simulate very complex system behavior with a bare minimum of declarative input. But a problem persists. I worked quite a bit more on the unit check warnings. The proble...

Re v40 - displays fine for me.

I think what we're seeing here is a bug that vanishes when Ventity is closed and reopened. But it's working fine now.

I think the DELAY3 is fine; the flow formulation is acting like a discrete event. Logically, it seems to me that putting a DELAY in any equation should cause a DELAY. What you say implies that's not the case if the equation is a flow. If a function is not going to work as expected, why not issue a ...

My, my, I thought I’d checked to see that unit checking was on. Turning it on, I saw 18 warnings. I was able to reduce these to 7, but am unable to go further due to lack of understanding. In plain English, how would you read this warning: “Flow "set is abstain" -- flow "1/Year" ...

A slight bug here. On the Country – Graphs diagram, I’ve changed the name of an auxiliary to “LTQ points rise.” Its slider row now vanishes. Editing the slider will not bring the row back. Even changing to another variable and then changing back to “LTQ points rise” will not bring it back. I’ve enco...

The Voter entity now uses DELAY3 and SMOOTH3. I noticed in action Create Initial Voters that stocks for DELAY3 and SMOOTH3 are automatically added to the diagram as surrogates. I suspect this should not be done for any of the functions implemented as macros. I’ve deleted them from the diagram. The u...

Moving forward and appreciating Ventity’s many rich features! My prediction on how use of DELAY3 (input, delay time) should behave is not working out. A delay time of 10 years is behaving like it’s using 1 year. This puzzling behavior may be seen in the diagrams for Voter and Country-Graphs, for LTQ...

Hey Tom, I laughed so hard! Thanks! I'm now proceeding a lot more smoothly, now that the big decisions based on data are done and I've learned the basics of Ventity, thanks to your gracious help! To maintain conceptual control of 13 actions so far, I used an action name prefix convention. They are o...

Good news, after an exercise walk and thinking fresher, I noticed I was looking at the wrong action. According to the error message, the problem is in action Accumulate Number Supporters. There, using control drag, I changed refVoter (large dot) politician supporter to shadow refVoter.politician sup...

Another challenge. In country action Accumulate One Supporter, I’m getting the error “Unexpected character '●' (context: initializing Attributes; trigger "Accumulate One Supporter" invoker for "_invoker.accumulate_one_supporter"., in action_accumulate_number_supporters_country)” ...

Thanks Tom, my mistake. Still having trouble thinking in Ventity's terms. Let's see if I can do a tad better!