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When a variable is needed at submission time, it is first sought in the task itself. If it is not found in the task, it is sought from the task's parent and so on, up through the node levels until found. For any node, there are two places to look for variables. The user-defined variables are looked for first, and then any generated variables.
At present, an undefined variable causes a task to abort immediately, without submitting a job. ecflow_ui will display this failure in the info-window.
Example of Variable inheritance

suite x
 edit TOPLEVEL 10
 edit MIDDLE 10
 edit LOWER 10
 family f
   edit MIDDLE 20
   task t
     edit LOWER abc
   task t2
 endfamily
 family f2
   edit TOPLEVEL 40
   task z
 endfamily
endsuite



This would produce the following results:
Table 4 1 Results of variable inheritance

Command

task t

Task t2

task z

echo TOPLEVEL %TOPLEVEL%

10

10

40

echo MIDDLE %MIDDLE%

20

20

10

echo LOWER %LOWER%

abc

10

10