One of the challenges in developing the new action diagram editor to support keyboard entry was the need to ensure that each part of a statement was unambiguous and easy and quick to enter. This necessitated a few minor changes to the action diagram syntax.
- View Names. The parts of a view name are
separated by a . rather than a space, for example IN.CUSTOMER.CODE not IN
CUSTOMER CODE.
- Several operators are simplified to aid keyboard
entry for example ‘IS EQUAL TO’ is replaced by ‘=’ and ‘IS NOT EQUAL TO’ is
replaced by ‘!=’.
- Keywords that contain spaces in the
legacy toolset are joined with underscores.
For example, FOR EACH becomes FOR_EACH, READ EACH becomes READ_EACH and
ELSE IF becomes ELSE_IF. This is also true for some expression clauses, for
example IS_BETWEEN and IS_IN, IS_VISIBLE.
- SET_PROPERTY. The legacy CA Gen toolset uses a
SET verb for two completely different types of statement: setting a view value
and setting an ole/com/object property. The Action Diagram Editor uses
SET_PROPERTY for the latter instead of SET, so the distinction is clear,
avoiding ambiguity.
- READ_EACH statements always have a (for each
successful iteration) clause even if there are no exception clauses.
- Numerous statements and clauses present detail
information directly in the diagram for convenient viewing and editing, whereas
the legacy toolset would provide some of these properties only via a separate
pop-up dialog. For example, Event
properties default, always move, never move is displayed in the Action Diagram itself.
- Various expression parts have also been subtly
changed to aid auto-suggest, making each combination distinct and unique where
possible to avoid ambiguity in the language.
However, because of the automatic nature of the suggestion lists
presented, these should be intuitive and clear.
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