How to run BCL from Excel (the simple way) Part 1

For some time now I've been building QUEST models by using BCL script rather than the traditional User Interface.  I do this because it provides me with a very detailed (and procedural) look at what I've done to a model, and helps to glean out what assumptions I've made along the way.

It also lets me rebuild a model from scratch whenever I want, so I can (somewhat) easily modify some model parameter and have that change made in my model.  To make changing parameters easier I build my BCL scripts in Excel using formulas.  When I need to rebuild my model I can just click a user button in Excel and up pops QUEST to execute my script.

The following posts will tell you how to set up the same thing in your version of Excel.

Since we're basically just going to build a text (.bcl) file in Excel and execute it in QUEST, we need to first set up a QUEST .bat file that will open QUEST and execute the commands in a BCL file.  Looking at the online documentation, all we have to do is append "-b" on to the call to QUEST.exe with the BCL file name.

To set up a quest_bcl.bat file just make a copy of your quest.bat file (or whatever .bat file you use to initialize environment variables before starting QUEST, usually Deneb\Quest\Quest.bat) and find the line where QUEST is being started (I believe it's something like "start/max %DENEB_PRODUCT%.exe %1 %2..."), and replace it with this:

quest -b < %1

The "< %1" just tells the command line to take the first command line argument passed in and pass it on to "quest -b".

To test this, try creating a simple BCL file that creates a machine and places it at some location, then transfers control of the program to the user (otherwise QUEST will just close out having completed its task):

    CREATE MACHINE CLASS 'Machine1'

    LOCATE ELEMENT 'Machine1_1' AT 100, 100, 100

    TRANSFER TO MENU

Save this into a plain text file and name it what you'd like (preferably with a .bcl extension, but it doesn't matter much).  Note the full path to the file.

Next, open a command prompt and navigate it to the directory where you saved your quest_bcl.bat file.  In the command prompt type: 

    quest_bcl.bat "bcl_file_path.bcl"

where bcl_file_path is the full path to the BCL file you saved (unless it's in the same directory as your quest_bcl.bat).  You don't have to enclose the BCL file path in double quotes unless there is a space in the path.

If everything is working right, QUEST should launch and create a machine at the specified coordinates.

In the next post, I'll show you how to set up a simple Excel Addin (.xla file) that will let you build a BCL file from a set of Excel cells and launch it in QUEST.