TRY … CATCH and text merge

I recently ran into a problem with some text merge code. Under certain conditions, the text merge file contained only the first part of the text being output. I had a hard time tracking it down until I found this article in which someone else ran into the same problem. The culprit was a function I called from within the text merge code; that function has a TRY … CATCH structure and under some conditions, an error occurred and the CATCH caught it. The issue is that when CATCH fires, it sets _TEXT, the variable containing the handle for the text merge output file, to –1, preventing further output to the file.

The solution is to save the current value of _TEXT, set it to –1, execute the code with the TRY … CATCH structure, and reset _TEXT to the saved value at the end. Temporarily setting _TEXT to –1 prevents the file from being closed if an error occurs.

lnText = _text
_text  = -1
try
* some code here
catch
* some code here
endtry
_text = lnText