# How about a variable containing the InstanceID?
**URL:** https://www.finalbuilder.com/forums/t/how-about-a-variable-containing-the-instanceid/3815
**Category:** Feature Requests
**Created:** [January 23, 2007, 8:16am UTC](https://www.finalbuilder.com/forums/t/how-about-a-variable-containing-the-instanceid/3815 "2007-01-23T08:16:50Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@deleted\_user](https://www.finalbuilder.com/forums/u/deleted_user)
#### Post date: [January 23, 2007, 8:16am UTC](https://www.finalbuilder.com/forums/t/how-about-a-variable-containing-the-instanceid/3815/1 "2007-01-23T08:16:50Z")
I am trying to come up with a good way to quickly identify problems with builds. The log files can get very big and be very tedious to dig through. I think that if FinalBuilder gave me a variable that contained an InstanceID I could use this to create either a URL to a problem in the HTML log, or an XML query that would point to a problem in the XML log.
Obviously having an action that reported the InstanceID of the current action would just give you the instance of that logging action, which wouldn’t be too useful, but perhaps having the InstanceID of the last-executed action, or of the parent of the current action would be helpful.
What do you think?
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### Author:  [@Vincent](https://www.finalbuilder.com/forums/u/Vincent)
#### Post date: [January 24, 2007, 12:28pm UTC](https://www.finalbuilder.com/forums/t/how-about-a-variable-containing-the-instanceid/3815/2 "2007-01-24T12:28:00Z")
Hi Mike
Using a variable for this wouldn’t work with async groups. A better option would be that we expose the instanceID to scripting, that way you could get it from a script event. I’ll look into this.
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### Author:  [@Vincent](https://www.finalbuilder.com/forums/u/Vincent)
#### Post date: [January 24, 2007, 12:46pm UTC](https://www.finalbuilder.com/forums/t/how-about-a-variable-containing-the-instanceid/3815/3 "2007-01-24T12:46:50Z")
Hi Mike
The next test build will have the Action.InstanceID exposed to scripting.