How can a concatenated string be transformed into a variable name?

This is almost certainly not what you want to do, because creating different variable names on the fly usually means you should be creating a different data structure - e.g. a hash table indexed by the date rather than a unique variable name. However, if you really want to do this (the wrong way in my opinion), then taking your code:

item=""
lists=setof(i parseString(getCurrentTime() "") i!=" " && i!=":")
foreach(elem lists
    item=strcat(item elem)
)

(I assume you used some kind of optical character recognition because it had some spurious parentheses) then you could do:

set(concat("a_" item) 5)

you can retrieve it with:

symeval(concat("a_" item))

A cleaner (more efficient in terms of creating garbage that needs collecting) way of building the variable name would be to do:

cleanup=pcreCompile("[ :]")
varName=concat("a_" pcreReplace(cleanup getCurrentTime() "" 0))

However, if you creating a number of these, I'd use a hash table (using makeTable) as I mentioned before.

Regards,

Andrew

This project is developed to meet requirements from the layout team. They need a persistently‑pinned UI panel that can be activated by clicks at any time. For this purpose, I planned to use dockWindow so that the panel can be docked inside the PTE frame. However, I have run into multiple issues during development, as listed below:

1. With my current implementation, the dock window is only created for a single session window. My expectation is to make this dock window available for multiple session windows simultaneously.
2. How can I completely delete an appForm from memory? I create an appForm via hiCreateLayoutForm, then construct the dock window with:

dock_W = hiCreateDockWindow(
                       ?appType "layout"
                       ?widgetType "form"
                       ?form appForm )

Afterwards I render the dock window with:

foreach( n ns hiDockWindow( ?window dock_W ?session n ) )

My intention is to automatically unset the global variable appForm after the dock window is generated. When creating the dock window for another session window, I would recreate the global appForm variable.

3. If fully destroying appForm is not feasible, I considered generating time‑dependent unique variable names. Each time a new session window opens, a brand‑new global variable such as appForm_currentTime would be generated to avoid naming conflicts caused by re‑using the same variable appForm.

This is the motivation behind my post.

There are three global variables in my codebase: appForm, layoutForm_pte and dock_W.

This project is developed to meet requirements from the layout team. They need a persistently‑pinned UI panel that can be activated by clicks at any time. For this purpose, I planned to use dockWindow so that the panel can be docked inside the PTE frame. However, I have run into multiple issues during development, as listed below:

1. With my current implementation, the dock window is only created for a single session window. My expectation is to make this dock window available for multiple session windows simultaneously.
2. How can I completely delete an appForm from memory? I create an appForm via hiCreateLayoutForm, then construct the dock window with:

dock_W = hiCreateDockWindow(
                       ?appType "layout"
                       ?widgetType "form"
                       ?form appForm )

Afterwards I render the dock window with:

foreach( n ns hiDockWindow( ?window dock_W ?session n ) )

My intention is to automatically unset the global variable appForm after the dock window is generated. When creating the dock window for another session window, I would recreate the global appForm variable.

3. If fully destroying appForm is not feasible, I considered generating time‑dependent unique variable names. Each time a new session window opens, a brand‑new global variable such as appForm_currentTime would be generated to avoid naming conflicts caused by re‑using the same variable appForm.

This is the motivation behind my post.

There are three global variables in my codebase: appForm, layoutForm_pte and dock_W.