The "Memo" window for editing and viewing long sections of text
Wherever the user needs to write more than a short amount of text, a Memo data-field should have been added to the data-table in your Orixa System.
Memo data-fields display multiple lines of text in the Edit-Form, and allow the user to type as much as they like. If the user double-clicks on a memo a specialized editor window opens with a number of powerful additional features.The memo can "speak" the words it contains, include links to other data-records in your Orixa App, as well as having basic features such as "Search" and "Replace".
Memo Edit and Memo Editor
On the left of the above image the Memo field is shown in-context, within the Edit Form. The user has doubled clicked (1.) opening the Memo-Editor, which is shown on the right hand side of the above image.
Specialized features of the Memo Editor
Open / Save
The text in the memo edit is stored in the Orixa database. Users may want to load text they have written earlier, or save the text to an external file on-disk. Use the "Open" and "Save" buttons to do this.
Add Template Text
The "Add Template Text" button opens a window of text segments the user can add to the field at the current point of the text which the user is editing. These segments of text need to be previously added to the "Types" framework-table in order for them to be made available to pick.
Insert Date
The "Insert Date" button simply adds the current date to the text being written.
Find / Replace
Find Dialog
Find/Replace allows global searching of longer text documents for specific text, and features the windows standard "F2" and "F3" to repeat the action. Enter the text you wish to look for, click "OK" in the "Find" window and close it, then press "F3" to find the next occurance, or "F2" to reopen the Find window.
Tags Search: Using Square Brackets in your text to create Live-Links
The Tags Search capability of the Orixa Memo Editor is slightly more specialized. It allows users writing long sections of text to add tags which can be used to index and search the data. Tagged text is any section of text enclosed by square brackets. Square brackets have been selected for use as tags as they are not usually used in normal text, or in common programming text where angle-brackets or curly brackets are more common.
If a system uses this feature, users need to be taught to add tags in a sensible way, following a useful methodology, so that the tagged data can be found and cross-referenced effectively.
Not all Orixa systems will need to use this feature, but if your business uses a lot of longer procedural text data it may be extremely useful.
Tags Search is accessed via the "Tags Search" button in the memo-form toolbar. If tags are already present in the text in a memo, then tags are also added to popup-menus, making the feature easy to access.
- You can create "Jump-links" in any text you write in an Orixa Memo control by putting square brackets around the text. Once such text is present in a memo, clicking on the "Tags Search" tool-button, or opening the popup-menu for the memo will show a link of these jump-links. Clicking on the link will take you straight to this position in the text.
- Your Tags can refer to Orixa records outside of the memo text. If you write in the form:
[TableName ID] example: [Customers 231445] or [TableName "Some Text"] then you can jump to opening this record, either by the "ID" of the record or by a Search on the "Name" of the record. Note the format: either a table-name followed by a number or a table-name followed by words enclosed by double-quotes.
Tags Search in Memo Editor
- Double click on the Memo to open the Memo editor.
- Click on the "Tags Search" button in the toolbar.
- Orixa will create a list of all the tagged text in the document, and show it in the drop-down list. This list is dynamically recreated each time the user clicks, so all updates to tags are shown live. Click on any item in the tags drop-down list and Orixa will move the user's cursor to that part of the text.
Tags Search link to Specific BusinessObject Record, using the "ID" as a reference
The Tags Search tool has an important added feature. If the tag includes the name of a BusinessObject followed by the ID of a specific record, then Orixa will generate a live link to this record allowing the user to open it, directly.
- Clicking on the Tags Search shows one or more Business Objects tags within the main tags-list. Note that Business Objects tags include an icon identifying the BusinessObject.
- Highlight the tag in the Memo Editor to enable this behaviour. If the tag is not highlighted, it will simply appear in the tags drop-down list as an item the user can find.
To add BusinessObject tags users must be trained to insert the correct ID value. If the wrong ID is entered the tag will not work. Orixa does not test the validity of every tag the user types.
NOTE: Because these tags are not audited it is possible for a link to work, but then stop working if the linking record is deleted.
Memo which contains Tags |
Memo with 2 Search Tags. Both of these are links to records in the database, one uses the ID the other uses text in double-quotes. Clicking on the link at the bottom of the menu jumps-to and selects the text. This means if the text in the memo is long, and you have references to a lot of different records within it, you can jump to these first, without necessarily opening the linked record |
Click to Open linked Record, once the tag is SELECTED |
Once the tag is selected, either manually, or via the menu-click marked at 1., in the image, the "Open Selected table-name record" menu-item will appear, as shown at 2. Clicking on this will try to open the record using the text in the tag-search. If the tag is wrongly entered, or the record has been deleted Orixa will return an error when the user clicks "2.". |
Text-to-Speech
Orixa includes an automated functionality allowing users to hear long-text to be spoken to them, so they do not have to read it.
To access it, undertake the following steps.
Accessing Text-to-Speech from the Memo-menu |
In any memo window, right click with the mouse and click on "Speak text in this window" as shown at 1., in the image.
NOTE: If you select part of the text with the mouse, only this portion of text will be spoken. This can be useful if the window contains a long section of text.
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Text-To-Speech play-back Window
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The "Speech Player" window will open as shown in the image. This includes:
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