Modifying Panels › Initialization Section › Specify Help Panel Names

Specify Help Panel Names

When a user presses the PF1 key, a one-line help message sometimes appears at the top of the panel. If the user presses PF1 again, or if a one-line message is not defined for the panel, the product displays a help panel.

You can use the .HELP parameter in the initialization section to tell CA TPX what help messages and panels to display, and when to display them. For example, a panel definition contains the following initialization section:

)INIT 
.HELP=(HEN0123 VAR1:HEN0123A VAR2:HEN0123A VAR3:HEN0123B)

The product uses the following process to determine what help messages and panels to display:

1. CA TPX finds the current location of the cursor on the screen. If the cursor is not in an input or output field, it uses the global help ID, which in this case is HEN0123. If the cursor is in an input or output field (for example, VAR2), it uses the help ID associated with that field. In this case, the help ID for VAR2 is HEN0123A.
2. CA TPX looks for the message ID in member TxxMSGL (where xx is the user's language code). This data set contains the line help messages. The first eight characters of the help messages are the message ID. If the software finds a message ID that matches the help ID, it displays the message on the line of the panel where the variable ZHELP is defined.
3. If there is no message ID matching the help ID, or if the user presses PF1 again, the software uses the help ID to find a member in the PANELS data set. If it finds a member name that matches the help ID, it displays the panel.

If it can't find a member name that matches the help ID, it uses the global help ID (in this case, HEN0123) and searches the PANELS data set again. If it can't find the global help ID in the data set, it displays the following message:

MEN0001 HELP not available