All the commands have the same structure: the first parameter is a case-sensitive command name (with no - or / prefix). The command name shows how many arguments it expects according to the number of colons in the name: logoutAndExit expects no arguments, setProject: expects one argument, and loginDB:user:password: expects three arguments – a database name, user name, and password. Note that for commands that expect arguments, there are no spaces in the command name, and the last character is always a colon.

After a command name expecting N arguments, the next N parameters on the command line will be used as those arguments. If a parameter contains a space, you will need to escape it or quote the parameter according to the rules of your platform.

As an example, consider the following command line that would login to the ‘demo’ repository, open the ‘Watch’ project, run the ‘Autobuild’ generator for all WatchFamily diagrams, and then logout:

mep55.exe loginDB:user:password: demo user user setProject: Watch forAll:run: WatchFamily Autobuild commit logoutAndExit

Here, mep55.exe is the name of the MetaEdit+ program executable. The first parameter given to the executable is loginDB:user:password: with its arguments demo, user and user. The second command is setProject: with its argument Watch. The third command, forAll:run:, is followed by its two arguments: WatchFamily and Autobuild. The last two commands, commit and logoutAndExit, do not have any arguments.

Unrecognized commands will be logged to log.txt (also when calling from MERL):

Command not found: foobar

If too few arguments are supplied for a command, this will be logged to log.txt:

Not enough arguments for command: forAll:run: - expected 2, got 1: 'barfoo' 

Note that if there are subsequent commands after the insufficient arguments, they will be interpreted as the missing arguments. (Most commands take freeform strings as arguments, so there is no real way to distinguish.)

Please note that if you start the API from the command line, you do not want to add the logoutAndExit command into that same command line – if you do, the execution of MetaEdit+ is halted before your API utilization can take place. So, do not logout from the command line, but instead call logoutAndExit as the final API command.

When using the API from a generator, it is best to start the API with internal...execute, but have the program that will use it close it with an API call to stopAPI. Alternatively a generator can send stopAPI first (a no-op if none are running), then startAPI. This will ensure that there is just one API Tool running.