It should work. Hmm, dont know whats going on. Well untill someone throws some more light on it, resort back to your original code. Its not good to have red in your transformer.
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
But when i have removed the initial value assignment and went back to my original code,still i see my first stage variable in red colour.There are no compilation or run time errors.