Newbie Corner - Tips and Tricks - Using Clarion Help and Online Resources - Part2

by Frank Magistro

Published 1999-05-01    Printer-friendly version

Overview

This month’s article will be short in length. I’m currently working full speed ahead on re-writing a section of the Enterprise Tools Manual – Wise for Clarion and have had little free time to devote to this article.

In the remaining parts of this article I’ll be covering:

• Quickly review a new On-line knowledge base supplied free at TopSpeed’s Web Site.
• A tour of Help>Contents. I’ll show you how to locate vital information that is only found within Help>Contents.
• How to use Clarion’s Menu Editor while viewing code.
• Describe other Helper Applications.
• How to copy example code from Help directly into your application.

New Information On-line.

If you haven’t visited TopSpeed’s Web Page lately you’ll now find a great new repository of information. Go to www.topspeed.com and on the middle left side you’ll see:

Click on the above image and you’ll be presented with the following search dialog:

Spend some time to explore this free new service from TopSpeed. Try a few queries.

A Tour of Help>Contents

Now let’s take a look at important information most users of Clarion unfortunately don’t take the time to review. From Clarion’s Main Menu, Select Help>Contents. You should see the following dialog. (I’m using Clarion version C5EE to create this article. If you are not using this version of Clarion, some of the screen shots and content you are presented with will be different).

Press the Readme button. If you are not familiar with this area of the On-line help, take a few minutes to review the material. Select Contents. You should now see the following screen.

Review Enhancements to the Clarion Development Environment. This is where you’ll find what function has been added in a release. You’ll usually find information here that is not found in any other place.

Next, Select Known Limitations. You should thoroughly review this section of the On-line help after installing TopSpeed supplied updates to your system.

Tip and Trick

I’m now going to show you how to find some vital information that is tucked away within the On-line Help. While viewing the Know Limitations, scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll see Items Not documented elsewhere. Select it and you’ll be presented with the following critical information:

How to Use the Menu Editor While Viewing Code

We are going to load and run a hand-coded example, "Oledemo2", and then quickly modify the main menu by using the Menu Editor instead of modifying the code directly.

From Clarion’s main menu File>Open then select Project(*.prj) from the File of Types: drop down menu. (the Oledemo2 example can be found in the Clarion5/Examples/Src/Ole folder.)

Now Run the Oledemo2 application. If you haven’t played with this example application yet, try it out.

You should see the following Project Tree dialog:

Double Click on Oledemo2.clw. You now should see the following dialog containing the code for this file.

Scroll down until you locate the line starting with "MainWin WINDOW('OLE Demo')" and position the cursor directly over the middle of the word WINDOW.

Finally, here is the Tip and Trick. Press Ctrl-F while the cursor is directly over term "Window"in the WINDOW statement invokes the Window Editor. You now an easy way to edit menus in hand-coded applications using the Window Editor.

In the next article I plan to review a few of the "Helper Applications".

If you have comments regarding this article or ideas about how we can improve Clarion’s User Manuals, drop me an e-mail at fmagistro@topspeed.com.

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Clarion Magazine ISSN 1718-9942