Document under construction

Hypertext and ?LongText

?LongText's ability to present formatted text may convince you to use it in your design. A second powerful ?LongText feature is its ability to create documents with hypertext links. We will use the following data to illustrate:

LongText : TShirt_Essay

The effect of origin on TShirt quality is not well 
understood. Sarah (1990) notes that shirts made with 
Egyptian cotton are particularly durable. She mentions 
the infamous sam19 as a case in point. Vicki (1982) 
claims that shirts manufactured by Champion are now 
collector's items.
 
***LongTextEnd***
When the hypertext feature is invoked, ACEDB identifies words that correspond to objects in the database and creates hypertext links to them. Suppose the essay above is in our database, perhaps linked to a TShirt. Also assume that other data, not detailed here, has been loaded:

The essay contains words corresponding to these objects and thus several potential hypertext links. To activate them we first need to create a special KeySet specifying which classes are to participate in hypertext links:

KeySet : searchedClasses
Class TShirt
Class Person
Class Manufacturer
A KeySet object is used to list classes or objects in them.

[text window inline]

[longtext window inline]

[longtext with hypertext links]

Whether or not the hypertext feature is useful to you depends largely on the sort of documents you commit to LongText and whether or not they include object names. If your bibliographic references include abstracts, you might consider rendering the abstracts as LongText instead of Text or ?Text. If you are using LongText exclusively for user help, hypertext may not add much value. Remember that the user chooses to activate the links with the "search" button; if you decide to allow links, users are not forced to look at them unless they want.

ACEDB's implementation of hypertext is limited in two ways. First, all possible links will be made; if a Locus is called "and" or "are", these words will be highlighted in every LongText document, whether or not they are Locus names. You cannot "escape" individual links. Second, you can only link to a single object at a time. If you activate links to two classes, and there happens to be an object in both classes with the same name, you will link to only one of them. But even with these restrictions hypertext has the ability to make longish text entries much more useful.


Show me the whole t-shirt model again.

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