What's your favourite TM1 rules editor?

[ParisHilton]

I haven't seen the TM1 10 yet, so don't know if it's any better.
Personally I use the standard editor, although the advanced one should be more user friendly, it just annoys me, I can't quite put my finger on why!
I have seen the Excel rules editor advocated as the best (mainly because you can store previous versions of rules in it).

But what do forumites prefer?

[rozef]

For my part, I use notepad++ with a userDefineLang.xml file which highlight TM1 functions.
There is a portable edition so you can bring it in any customer post.

Now I can't bear the standard editor interface anymore.

[Alan Kirk]

I haven't seen the TM1 10 yet, so don't know if it's any better.
Personally I use the standard editor, although the advanced one should be more user friendly, it just annoys me, I can't quite put my finger on why!
I have seen the Excel rules editor advocated as the best (mainly because you can store previous versions of rules in it).

But what do forumites prefer?

There is no "best", just what's "best" for you. I have a preference for .xrus as I've said many times before. The ability to archive past sheets for auditing purposes is part of that, the ability to format the rules in any way that I want to is useful to me (particularly when navigating long rule sheets), the ability to construct rule syntax from Excel formulas is useful to me (and before anyone says "Yeah, but that's only done rarely in practice", I'd add the response "By me it's not rare, it's available to anyone else who feels inclined to use it, and if you have a problem with that I don't give a ****" ). Find and replace works properly in Excel; it doesn't in any of the more "advanced" editors. For example in both the standard and advanced editor (in 9.5.2 at least) if you select a block and search for a word it'll search for the first occurrence of the word which is outside the block. This is the same garbage that was in the Java infested Slowformance Modeller in 10.1, though at least with the standard and advanced Rules editors the last word that you searched for is retained. (Not the case in the TI editor in Slowformance Modeller, and probably not the rules editor either if it's based on the same platform.)

Where .xrus are less useful is that they have very limited ability to create formulas via guided prompts. The Advanced Rules Editor does give you the Insert Function dialog which is useful. I haven't explored rules creating extensively in Slowformance Modeller in 10.1, but I did have the following to say about the TI editor's implementation of the technology in that attempt:

Speaking of which, the Content Assist dialog is another minimalist attempt. 10 years in the making, it hasn't quite reached the efficiency of the Intellisense system that MS had in VBA back in Office 97. Want to do an asciioutput? Fine and dandy, start typing Ascii, then press [Ctrl]+[Space] to bring it up (oooh, an actual keyboard shortcut!!! Slick!) and hey presto, you're told that the first argument is a string, and the second argument is a string, and there are more arguments which are probably strings as well. None of this mollycoddling of giving you descriptive names explaining (or at least hinting) what each argument is the way Intellisense does, this is a Content Assist dialog for Real Men (TM Iboglix Software Corp) where you get to manually look up what each argument is and what the function does. I say "manually" because (again, unlike the 15 year old Intellisense technology), you can't select the keyword and hit [F1] and have the relevant help page appear. Of course, if I can never remember which of the 7 separate help documents the relevant entry is in, how can I expect poor old Content Assist to?

Now, I don't miss this all that much because I know the syntax of most functions off the top of my head anyway. But a new user may well be better served by at least the Advanced Rules Editor's ability to guide their syntax.

Like I said, no "best", just "best for you".

[jim wood]

I agree with Alan's point regarding xru files. They are pretty handy. Saying that I don't often use them on customer site due to the floating nature of post implementation development / support. I tend to use the old rule editor and for a good reason. The new rule editor can't cope with certain characters like the UK pound sign. This and some of the other problems with the new editor have been covered on here before so I won't drivel on.

[Harvey]

I just use the basic rule editor. However, I have a fairly strict formatting technique when it comes to rules, with judicial use of line breaks and indenting. I also make sure the font is always set to Courier New, as this makes it much more readable.

I have used Notepad++ with the TM1 syntax highlighting and that is better, but I got sick of the cut and paste step.

The "advanced rule editor", when I first tried it, had this weird habit of locking the cursor into selection mode... so if carelessly moved my cursor down with the Arrow, Home/End or PgUp/PgDn keys and press delete or backspace, it would often delete large chunks of text. I found this too dangerous and immediately researched how to turn it off.

I don't really have an issue with the standard rule editor, so I've just stuck with it.