BrainStreamReservedNames

Reserved marker and variable names

Reserved marker names

The following markers have special meaning and will be inserted by BrainStream in certain situations. These marker names may not be used for other markers. However, users can define their own actions for these markers.

BS_INIT : at startup, BrainStream inserts this marker; it will always be the first processed marker. It may be useful to associate functions that initialize your experiment with this marker, for example the initialization of certain variables.
BS_END : at shutdown, BrainStream inserts this marker; it will always be the last processed marker. It may be useful to associate functions that finalize your experiment with this marker, for example saving certain variables (Note: former BS_EXIT).
BS_ABORT : this marker triggers alternative shutdown, but still guarantees a normal closing of acquisition related items. It can be used if you want to skip the actions defined for BS_END (Note: former BS_QUIT).

Reserved variable names

Users can create any number of user defined variables. The names must not be equal to any of the reserved names in use by BrainStream. These reserved variable names are listed below:

Reserved variable name	Why it is reserved
marker	might get confused with marker column in exp.def.table
funcs	might get confused with function column in exp.def.table
feval	might get confused with feval column in exp.def.table
client	might get confused with client column in exp.def.table
looptick	might get confused with looptick column in exp.def.table
name	name of marker (and assoicated event)
time	time of execution referred to number of acquired samples
hdr	acquisition/file header info
trial	information about selected data
data	requested raw data, trial information, samplerate
BRAINSTREAM	used by BrainStream internally
in	specifies incoming module variables
out	specifies outgoing module variables
trace_vars	Keeps a list of traced variables (output in logfile)
brainstreamversion	the version of BrainStream that was used to run the experiment