#Helm – New Customer
3 messages in this thread
Hi Jerrell,
Just received Helm this morning and it looks more than adequate for my needs,
although some conversion is in order on my part to generally understand it.
My main concern is the need to store/sort/find/loop process database arrays
and I think you mentioned that Helm does this automatically in part with its
page and textfields. I would require to use disk files for storage really so
the user can load whichever database file. I see a few ways of doing this and I
think the random access and the textfile (or amigaguide) ways are the only ways.
Correct me if I'm wrong. I'll no doubt have to look into it through the example
files in more detail than my quick glance this morning before cutting the lawn
<g>.
No worries yet as I really need to play with it awhile to see how it does
things.
Also in the "copyright" info, am I right to assume I can use your "artwork"
etc in my commercial productions.
Apart from the questions it looks very impressive indeed.
C.C.I. Computer Applications
* Thirsk – North Yorkshire – United Kingdom *
Charles:
Helm won't write database fields directly (though Jerrell tells us it's on
the way). However, Helm is more or less a flat-file database. Think of
the pages as records and the various objects as fields within a record.
It would be possible through Helmish (colloquial name for Helm's scripting
language), ARexx, or a combination of the two to write database files
directly to disk.
An alternative method would be to use Helm's slicing commands (which are
quite powerful once you get the hang of them) to put the information into
a container or an invisible textfield, then use "load text" and "save" to
write the contents of the container or textfield to disk as an ASCII file.
Tear into those example books. They're a gold mine. PlotBook, Customer,
CorrectOrder, and BatchBook are quite helpful. And read the AmigaGuide
files about the program history. There are a number of bug fixes and new
commands/properties not laid out in the manual.
Stay cool B-)
-Larry
Larry,
I see the idea behind the pages for a database but would prefer a disk file
system. Now the only thing I would lose is the facility to sort info but that
could be got around but wouldn't harm having a "sortarray" script function. Now
to my understanding problems. The container system sounds OK but the examples
in the manaul as well as the explanations are not suffice to figure. "put an
array of" Number <,number> etc etc. What do these numbers relate to? Also the
array index system; I take it that the first [] is the item number and the
second [] is the index. It doesn't fully explain this.
Yes I'm getting there but only slowly as with the "free-form" feel of Helm
it's taking some working out all the forms/layers/pages, which also doesn't
help when it comes the reading the example books. I totally lost to be honest
with you, but I know some day soon it'll hit me and life will be save aain 🙂
P.S. You haven't got any books/routines on textfield formating, text layout
and the like have you. It's for compiling lists of formatted text taken from
the database files.
Anyhow I'll go see your uploaded books and bury myself in this Helm.
C.C.I. Computer Applications
* Thirsk – North Yorkshire – United Kingdom *