BARfly is built upon the BAR engine, so BARfly lets you call many of the underlying engine's functions directly.  You can get low-level information this way, of course, but this functionality is also useful in that you can get the opportunity to test the interfacial functions before using them (and the BAR engine) in your application.

To invoke the interfacial function dialog box, select Run.Run BAR Interfacial Function from the menu or press F9.  You are presented with a combo box that selects the function to call, and depending on how many parameters the function has, anywhere from zero to ten controls for entering arguments to pass to the function.

While this interface does not let you call every function associated with the BAR engine, it serves to test the individual functions and report some pieces of information you can't get easily any other way (such as the last opcode error).

If you have called a function before, you can call the same function again, with the same arguments, with the keyboard shortcut Shift+F9.

Argument edit controls use the subnode value-entry parsing rules.

Depending on the type of view currently active at the time you try to run a BAR interfacial function, some interfacial functions will be unavailable.  The following rules apply:

BAR_Services object methods are always available.

BAR_Registry object methods are available only to a registry view.

BAR object methods are available to both implementation file views and data file views.  There are further restrictions for I.F. views:  an I.F. must have been compiled, and an I.F. view does not allow the user to call those functions of the BAR object that depend on a data file having been loaded.

Return values to the function, if any, are reported in the log.  The type of information reported depends on the return type of the function called.

Some functions modify the node browser's selection and/or modify data.  Consult the documentation to learn which functions do this.

Click here for the interfacial function reference.

  See also: [Compiling BAR implementation files] [Running BAR I.F. functions] [File revalidation]