Working with Texts
Adding
and maintaining individual form and component texts
Maintaining/Translating
all form and component texts
Subtituting
runtime values into texts
See also: Shared Texts, System Texts, Text Control.
Introduction
Texts are used throughout the Ebase system. All texts have the following characteristics:
- Texts are multi-lingual; at runtime, the appropriate texts are automatically displayed in the runtime language. Click here for further details.
- Each text can be used at any point in a form
- Texts can contain formatting HTML e.g. italic tags <i> </i>
- Texts are programmable
There are three types of texts
- Form or component texts (also called local texts). These exist within each form or component; they are local and cannot be shared between forms or components.
- Shared texts. These are maintained centrally and can be shared by all forms.
- System texts. These are texts used internally by the Ebase system to display various texts. The text content can be configured.
Maintaining Texts
Adding and maintaining individual form and component texts
Many controls have their own embedded texts e.g. a Group Panel control has a group header text, a Button Control has a button text etc. In addition, you can add a text at any point by inserting a Text Control which displays the texts dialog shown below.
Texts can be maintained in a number of ways:
- in the WYSIWYG View by double clicking on a text (shows the texts dialog below)
- in the Properties View, by entering the text directly in the property box
- in the Properties View by clicking the … button on the right-hand side of each text property (shows the texts dialog below)
- by
clicking the Maintain language texts icon
on the form/component toolbar (shows the texts maintenance dialog)
Language: Select the text language from the dropdown which shows all supported languages
Contains HTML: indicates that the text contains formatting HTML or XHTML. See HTML Content for further information.
Text Reference: this shows the unique text id that is being used. Click the Change button to use a different text. This presents the dialog shown below which allows you to choose any existing text from the form or component (a local text) or any shared text. To use a shared text, select Shared from the Text namespace dropdown.
Maintaining/Translating all form and component texts
Individual texts can be translated using the Texts Dialog shown above. However, to translate texts
for an entire form/component, it is much easier to use the Text Maintenance
Dialog shown below which shows all texts for the form/component. To add texts
for a new language, select both an existing language and the new language; for
ease of translation, each text is displayed with the existing text adjacent to
the new text. The Text Maintenance Dialog is accessed by clicking the icon on the form/component toolbar.
All texts tab: shows all texts
Texts by Area tab: Shows texts page by page. Within this display, form level texts are shown in the Form tab and texts which are not displayed anywhere are shown on the Others tab.
To display a larger input box for each text, right click over the text and select Expand or double-click on the Type or Language column.
The following additional functionality is available only from the All Texts tab:
Create new text: click this button to create a new text.
Delete text: click this button to delete all selected texts. Only unreferenced texts can be deleted.
Change a text id: double click on the id, then change as required.
Show References: right click on a text and select References.
Cut/Copy/paste texts: you can copy/paste texts within a form, between forms or components and can also paste shared texts or copy form/component texts to shared texts. Texts can be cut and copied from any of the panels in the above dialog. Whan pasting, the All Texts tab is automatically displayed so the pasted texts can be seen. Texts are automatically renamed when a text with the same id already exists in the target form; this is done by adding an underscore and a number to the text id.
Maintaining Shared Texts
See shared texts.
Maintaining System Texts
See system texts.
HTML Content
WARNING: the system renders the page as XHTML in the WYSIWYG View, and not all HTML content is considered valid within the XHTML standard. This can sometimes cause unexpected results when HTML content is added to a page. Click here for further information.
Texts Programming
Subtituting runtime values into texts
Each text can contain any number of variables to be
substituted dynamically at runtime with the values of one or more form fields.
Each such variable must start with &&, followed by the form field name.
For example, form text:
Department &&DEPT,
expenditure for &&YEAR
is displayed as:
Department Personnel,
expenditure for 2005
if field DEPT has value 'Personnel'
and field YEAR has value '2005'.
A field name can be delimited by any character which cannot
appear in a field name e.g. a space or comma are fine, but a hyphen and
underscore will not work as these are treated as part of the field name. Field
name variables can also be specified as &&{VAR1}
e.g. &&{DEPT}; if this syntax is used, it does not matter which
character follows the variable. Environment
variable names can also be used.
Changing texts dynamically
Texts can
be changed dynamically at runtime in two ways. These changes are
temporary and last only to the end of the form execution.
Via text property of controls and fields
When a text
is configured as a property of a control or a field, it can be changed as shown
below. Field texts cannot be changed using FPL.
|
FPL: |
API based language
(Javascript): |
|
// change text of Text Control set TEXT12.text = 'any new text'; |
// change text of Text Control controls.TEXT12.text.text = "any new text"; // change field
label text fields.FIELD1.labelText.text
= "any new text"; |
See the documentation on each control for a list of property names.
Via Set Text command
This is only currently supported by FPL and there is no equivalent for API based languages.
The set text FPL command changes a text using its id. The difference between this method and the control property method is that the set text command changes the text in the text pool, therefore the text will be changed in all locations where it is referenced.
There are two supported syntaxes:
set text textid = 'any new text';
e.g.
set text TXT14 = 'Your answer is not clear -
please provide additional details';
or..
set textid1
= textid2;
e.g.
set text TXT14 = TXT29;
Reading Texts
This is only currently supported by FPL and there is no equivalent for API based languages.
A text can be read using the gettext() function. This can read a text of any type (component/form, shared or system) and in any language e.g.
set temptext = gettext('TXT1');
set temptext = gettext('SHR11', 'Shared', 'EN');
Click here for details.