| Subject | Help File, was Re: [IBO] Re: Third posting |
|---|---|
| Author | Helen Borrie |
| Post date | 2005-10-05T09:40:15Z |
At 08:53 AM 5/10/2005 +0000, Dany Marmur wrote:
writes the helptext right inside the source units, in the interface section
of units, to be more specific. We use a Help generator called Time2Help,
that scans the entire source code.
To reduce bloat in the help file (since it was getting up about the 12MB
mark!), a few years ago we trimmed out a lot of how-to and hands-on stuff
and produced "Tech Info sheets" by merging and updating that stuff.
The help files and the tech info sheets are available to everyone, from the
IBO website.
Certainly, anyone is welcome to contribute additions to the help text. If
what you write is accurate and useful, it will find its way into the help,
somewhere, either the help text itself or a TI sheet. It would make more
sense to send that to me than to Jason, since it would come through to me
eventually, anyway.
Something we do seem to need to remind people about from time to time is
that we do NOT regurgitate helptext for the class members that are in the
VCL hierarchy. The nearer an IBO class is to a VCL ancestor, the more help
for it will be found in the Delphi help files. So people who are new to
Delphi really do need to get their teeth into the way inheritance
works. This is especially so with the TIBO* components, which are true VCL
descendants, with native TIB_* wrappings. Wherever the TDataset
architecture allows, Jason makes the native features available to the TIBO
classes, so much (but not all) of the TIB_* data access functionality is
available.
Helen
>Andy,Well, not really! If you have the source, you'll already know that Jason
>
>I don't know about help and stuff. Possibly you e-mail Jason. One
>comment, however - such a huge library (any lib/app) only has one real
>documentation - the source! This is about the only thing Bill Gates is
>quoted on that I fully agree with. I switched from C++ to Pascal just
>because I wanted to use IBO. I have written similar stuff from scratch
>(back in the days) and I knew from gut-feeling and experience that it
>would'nt be possible for me to use stuff like this without being able
>to debug trace into the lib. That's my 50 cents, anyway.
>
>OK - I'll probably get some beating from happy IBO users w/o source :)
writes the helptext right inside the source units, in the interface section
of units, to be more specific. We use a Help generator called Time2Help,
that scans the entire source code.
To reduce bloat in the help file (since it was getting up about the 12MB
mark!), a few years ago we trimmed out a lot of how-to and hands-on stuff
and produced "Tech Info sheets" by merging and updating that stuff.
The help files and the tech info sheets are available to everyone, from the
IBO website.
Certainly, anyone is welcome to contribute additions to the help text. If
what you write is accurate and useful, it will find its way into the help,
somewhere, either the help text itself or a TI sheet. It would make more
sense to send that to me than to Jason, since it would come through to me
eventually, anyway.
Something we do seem to need to remind people about from time to time is
that we do NOT regurgitate helptext for the class members that are in the
VCL hierarchy. The nearer an IBO class is to a VCL ancestor, the more help
for it will be found in the Delphi help files. So people who are new to
Delphi really do need to get their teeth into the way inheritance
works. This is especially so with the TIBO* components, which are true VCL
descendants, with native TIB_* wrappings. Wherever the TDataset
architecture allows, Jason makes the native features available to the TIBO
classes, so much (but not all) of the TIB_* data access functionality is
available.
Helen