Saving Active Initial threshold settings to model

[jrissman]

Hello Ventana team,

In our model, when run on a fresh installation of Vensim, very many warnings for Active / Initial value differences come up. They take the form of:

Code: Select all

WARNING: -Variable Name[subscripts]- Initial=X Active=Y has changed in value.

The differences shown are tiny, and we know this is not a problem with the model. I've set options on my own installation of Vensim (in Tools > Options > Settings tab > Thresholds box > Active Initial) to suppress these warnings for me.

However, whenever a new user installs Vensim and uses our model for the first time, all of these warnings appear, which makes the new user think the model is broken. Then they ask us about it. (This does not apply to Vensim Model Reader, which thankfully does not produce Active Initial warnings, and therefore doesn't have any threshold settings in the Options menu.)

We want to save the "Active Initial" threshold settings into the model file itself, so that when a new user with a fresh installation of Vensim first obtains and runs the model, it will use the thresholds we have carefully chosen, and the new user won't see any warnings. We think this makes sense as a model-specific setting, instead of a setting specific to each person's copy of Vensim, because the model always has the same values when run on different Vensim installations. As the model developers, we know how to set the warning thresholds intelligently for our model, whereas a new user may not know anything about Active Initial warnings or how to pick thresholds. They simply assume our model isn't working.

Is there any way to save the Active Initial warning threshold settings into the model, so a new user with a fresh installation of Vensim will use the warning threshold values we set for our model?

Thank you so much!

[tomfid]

Understood. One possibility would be to include your .ini file settings in a published model (vpm) containing the mdl. In the File>Publish dialog, check the "Include ... Settings" option. However, I'm not sure it will be sticky if the user saves the model out to an mdl for editing. It might be better if we made the setting model-specific.

[jrissman]

Got it. Thank you for considering it. No hurry on this feature - this one isn't a priority. But it's nice to have it on the list.

[Administrator]

This will be in the next release of Vensim.