
Hitachi Embedded Workshop User Manual
333
Appendix C: Placeholders
This appendix describes how to use the placeholders, a feature provided by several of the Hitachi Embedded
Workshop components.
C.1
What is a Placeholder?
A placeholder is a special string, inserted into text, which is replaced at some subsequent time for the actual
value. For example, one of the HEW placeholders is $(FULLFILE) which represents a file with a full path.
Suppose that you have an editor in c:\myedit\myeditor.exe, which can take the file to edit as a parameter. When
invoking the editor the following shortcut could be made, e.g.:
c:\myedit\myeditor.exe c:\files\file1.c
if you wanted to open FILE1.C from the directory c:\files. However, what happens if you want the HEW to open
any file through this editor? The problem is that the command above is specific to “c:\files\file1.c”. What we
want to be able to do is to tell the HEW to use the editor specified but to open the file that I have chosen at that
time. To do this, you can replace the specific name of the file for a general placeholder, i.e.:
c:\myedit\myeditor.exe $(FULLFILE)
Now whenever the HEW launches the editor with a file, it knows that it has to replace $(FULLFILE) with the
file you have selected.
C.2
Inserting a Placeholder
Placeholders can only be entered into three specific edit fields within the HEW (figures C.1, C.2 and C.3). There
are four ways a placeholder can be entered:
In the first example, place the insertion cursor at the point you would like to insert the placeholder and then
select the required placeholder from the pop-up menu to the right of the edit field.
Figure C.1: Placeholder Pop-up Menu
In the second example, select the required placeholder other than “Custom directory” from the drop-down list
box and specify a sub-directory relative to the directory shown by the placeholder. If you select “Custom
directory”, specify an absolute directory path in the “Sub-Directory” field.
Figure C.2: Placeholder Drop-down List and Sub-Directory Field