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The About Montage dialog is accessible through Help,
About Montage in the main menu or More,
Help, About
Montage in the Desktop
context menu. It displays
the executing program path and version, the current Montage metafile
location, size, timestamp, and version,
plus some basic information about your Windows system configuration.
Additional details about your system configuration can be
obtained by clicking on the fox icon image. Clicking on the Montage
icon image navigates a browser window to the
Montage home page on the World Wide Web, like the menu command Help,
Montage on the Web.
The two pushbuttons perform the following actions:
- OK: closes the About Montage dialog.
- Buy: opens a browser window to purchase SpaceTime Systems
products securely online.
This is equivalent to the Help, Buy
Online menu command.
Tip: Right-click on the
scrollable text region and select "Copy All" to copy the full text onto
the Windows Clipboard.
(Note that
this dialog is resizable.)
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This form is used for both error reporting and for displaying various types
of informational messages. The dialog is resizable, and you can scroll
through the full message text if it is too long to fit in the visible
area. Also you can select and copy any portion of the message text to the Clipboard.
After reviewing the message, close the dialog by clicking on the OK button
or clicking on the form's close box. The other pushbuttons and options are
intended primarily as an aid to developers.
When Montage encounters an error, it displays a
detailed error message in this type of dialog, with a title indicating some
specific error number. The title is repeated in the scrollable message
text, so you can easily capture all of this information and paste it into any
sort of document, e.g. an email or text
file. For routine errors, you would simply note the information and click OK. However, if an error occurs while initially opening a montage,
clicking OK causes the entire opening to fail, even though the error
might have affected only a single Shortcut.
In such cases, you may wish to choose "Ignore", instead of
"OK", so that the failure is confined to just that Shortcut, and the
rest of the opening is allowed to proceed normally. Choosing
"Abort" is a more drastic measure (seldom used), which causes the
offending object to terminate itself immediately.
Aside from reporting errors, the Diagnostic Message dialog also
displays warning messages and output from various commands. For
example,
selecting the "Diagnostics..." command from any of a number of menus,
e.g. Tools, Diagnostics..., shows
information about a specific internal object,
such as an individual Shortcut or the whole Montage
Desktop. Tools,
Analyze is another command that uses the Diagnostic Message dialog to
display its results. Although this modal dialog is a type of
internal form, it
actually resides on the Windows desktop, outside of the Montage Desktop window.
Closing the Diagnostic Message dialog allows you to proceed further.
Tip: Right-click on the
read-only message display area to invoke an editing context
menu, so you can easily copy the message text to the Clipboard.
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Montage controls, forms, and
the Desktop each can have an associated
Command
Processor window, and any number of these may be open at the same time. The Command Processor is a modeless, resizable form
residing in the Montage Desktop window, with a textbox into which you can type a single
Visual FoxPro (VFP) command line. Optionally, the state
of every Command Processor window is automatically saved and
restored along with the rest of the montage, but this is done only
if the Advanced, Save Command
Processors option is turned ON (it is OFF by default, to reduce metafile
size).
Command Processor windows
can be opened through a number of menus (e.g. Tools,
Command Processor), and
also via the CmdProc button in the Diagnostic Message
dialog. This facility is strictly for advanced usage, e.g. for
testing and debugging. (Most users should never use the
Montage Command Processor unless instructed to do so.)
The three pushbuttons perform the following actions:
- Run: executes the specified
Visual FoxPro command line in the textbox above.
The VFP command line is executed (by dynamic macro expansion), from the context of
a method in the associated object
for this Command Processor instance. The significance of the
context is that it allows you to refer directly to the object as
"THIS", as illustrated in the sample screen shot above. (You can
also refer to the containing form as "THISFORM", but that is less
likely to be useful.) Any
screen output, by default, is directed to the background of the Montage Desktop window.
- Goto: activates or sets the focus
to the object
associated with this Command Processor dialog.
Since there is no relationship between the placement of the Command
Processor dialog and its associated object, the Goto button provides a
convenient way to see this connection.
- Cancel: closes the Command Processor dialog without executing the
specified command line.
Exiting from the dialog in this manner saves the dialog layout and command
line, at least during the current Montage session. However, if you
terminate the dialog instead by clicking on its close box (in the window
title bar), changes to the dialog's placement and command line are not
saved. In any case, persistent retention of Command Processor states
across multiple sessions, i.e. after closing and reopening the montage, is
done only if the Advanced,
Save Command
Processors option is turned ON.
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About
Montage dialog
