Conditioned Help Text

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Conditioned Help Text

The Toolkit help text display has a facility to provide help text dependent on circumstances. Examples of where you might use this facility are:

Where a panel can operate in more than one mode (for example, adding or changing records) and different help text is required for each mode.
Where there is a choice of fields to display in one place on a panel (for example, fields conditioned by an indicator).
Where you wish to provide more than one level of help text (for example, novices or experts).

The Toolkit help display program makes use of label groups to determine which section of help text will be displayed. Label groups are specified as part of the ‘vector table’ entries described previously.

Up to three label groups may be specified for each vector table entry, each preceded by a space or an ‘N’. The ‘N’ indicates ‘not’, that is, not belonging to that label group. If more than one label group is specified on a vector table entry, the conditions are ANDed together.

The YDSPHLP program compares these label groups with those supplied at run time by the LBLGRP parameter to decide whether a particular vector table entry is eligible for use or is to be ignored. For a vector table entry to be eligible, all the label group conditions specified on the entry must be satisfied by the list of label groups supplied by the LBLGRP parameter. Thus, both the following conditions must be satisfied for an entry to be eligible:

If an entry has a label group specified for it (not preceded by an ‘N’), that label group must be in the list supplied by the LBLGRP parameter.
If an entry has a label group preceded by ‘N’ specified for it, it must definitely not be in the list supplied by the LBLGRP parameter.

If LBLGRP(*NOCHK) is specified, then no label group checking will take place.

If LBLGRP(*NONE) is specified, then only those entries with no label group at all, or with all label groups preceded by an ‘N’, will be eligible.

For example:

LBLGRP	Label Group	Result
A A A A A A	A NA B A B ANB	Eligible Eligible Not eligible Not eligible Not eligible Eligible
A B A B A B A B	A A B NA B ANB	Eligible Eligible Not eligible Not eligible
NONE NONE NONE NONE	A NA B	Eligible Not eligible Eligible Not eligible
NOCHK NOCHK NOCHK NOCHK	A NA B	Eligible Eligible Eligible Eligible

If LBLGRP is specified and no vector table entry is found:

Index is displayed
First page of help text will be displayed if there are no index entries