Editing the Help Text File

As you develop a forms-based system that uses the help facility, it is useful to escape to a system text editor to edit the help text while running the application. The logical or environment variable II_HELP_EDIT provides this capability. By setting this name at the operating system level to any value (for example, true), it causes an extra menu operation, Edit, to appear in the help facility.

Choose the Edit operation to invoke the default system text editor on the current frame's help file. The following command, issued at operating system level, invokes the help-editing capability:

See the ABF part of this guide for information about setting the default text editor.

You can specify a subtopic in a help file with the following format:

where listitem is the subtopic you want to be displayed and filename is the file containing the corresponding help text.

If you include one or more subtopic statements in a help file, Ingres displays a SubTopics menu item when you select Help. If you select SubTopics, Ingres displays a list of subtopics; the list consists of all the listitems from the subtopics statements in the help file. You can select a subtopic from the list: Ingres displays the help text from the corresponding file.

When you use help_forms in a frame, the associated help/keys operation displays descriptive text on the menu items in a table field. The table field includes FRS and user commands, the keys to which these are mapped, and an explanation of each command. Menu items are always shown at the top of the table field. When the explanation clause is not used, the Explanation column of the table field is blank for frame menu items.

To enter the descriptive text in the help/keys table field, use the explanation clause in the menu activation. The syntax for the explanation clause is as follows:

An example of the explanation clause follows:

'Add' (explanation = 'Add a new customer') =
begin
  insert …
end
'Help', key frskey2 =
begin
  help_forms (subject = 'Maintain Customer',
    file = 'filename');
end

This example results in the following display in the Help/Keys table field:

The following examples show how to display a file from the Personnel frame.

Windows: Call the Ingres helpfile facility to display the specified file in the Personnel frame:

Use the help_forms statement to display the specified file in the Personnel frame and to provide access to field validation criteria and function/control key mappings:

'Help'=
begin
   help_forms(subject= 'Personnel frame',
    file =
    '\usr\admin\files\personnel.txt');
end

UNIX: Call the Ingres helpfile facility to display the specified file in the Personnel frame:

Use the help_forms statement to display the specified file in the Personnel frame and to provide access to field validation criteria and function/control key mappings:

'Help'=
begin
  help_forms(subject= 'Personnel frame',
    file =
    '/usr/admin/files/personnel.txt');
end

VMS: Call the Ingres helpfile facility to display the specified file in the Personnel frame:

Use the help_forms statement to display the specified file in the Personnel frame and to provide access to field validation criteria and function/control key mappings:

'Help'=
begin
help_forms (subject = 'Personnel frame',
file= 'dra2:[usr.admin.files]personnel.txt');
end

Command	Control/Function Key	Explanation
Add	1	Add a new customer