This document discusses additional capabilities of Natural Construct, such as providing online help information for your applications, building new models, and creating JCL for DOS or OS environments. It also lists add-on products available for use with Natural Construct.
This document covers the following topics:
You can provide either passive or active online help for all your applications not just those generated using Natural Construct.
Note:
For more information about providing help for your applications, see
Natural Construct
Help Text.
The following sections describe each type of online help.
Passive help displays a window containing text that describes what to do on a panel or which parameters are required for a field. Within this help window, you can also include hotlinks to other help text members. Hotlinks appear as bolded text within angle brackets; when the user places the cursor over this text and presses Enter, another help window is displayed.
You create passive help in the Help Text subsystem. For example, you can create a help text member that describes the options available on a panel (panel-level help) or lists valid values for a field (field-level help). Using the Help Text subsystem allows you to:
Create multilingual help text for your applications
Separate technical writing requirements from the programming
To enable passive help
Create the help text members in the Help Text subsystem.
Enter the following as the HE (help) parameter for the panel or field on the associated map:
'CD-HELPR',=
CD-HELPR is a subprogram supplied with Natural Construct. When a user invokes help on a panel or field, it locates and displays the help member based on the internal name of the panel or field.
Active online help invokes a browse window listing valid values for a field and allows the user to select a value.
To create the active online help
Generate the browse helproutine module.
Enter the helproutine name as the HE (help) parameter for the field on the associated map.
In addition to the Help Text subsystem, Natural Construct provides the Administration subsystem. This subsystem helps you create your own models or modify the ones shipped with Natural Construct. You must have the appropriate security rights to access this subsystem. Typically, only Natural Construct administrators can access this subsystem.
Note:
For more information about creating or modifying models, see
Natural
Construct Administration and Modeling. This guide
describes the external programs, subprograms, and helproutines used in the
model creation process, the supplied utilities, and how to implement security
and multilingual support.
For DOS and OS mainframe environments, Natural Construct supplies models to create a JCL (job control language) member used to execute Natural in batch mode. The models generate the JCL stream into a Natural text object, which you can use as required.
The JCL models are:
| Model | Purpose |
|---|---|
| JCL-DOS-Natbatch | Generates JCL for the DOS environment. |
| JCL-OS-Natbatch | Generates JCL for the OS environment. |
As with all other Natural Construct models, the JCL models are available through the Generation main menu. For more information, see JCL Models (Mainframe) in Natural Construct Generation.