| Building Custom Forms |  |
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0.1. Message Templates
The Form Manager program was designed to use XML (Extensible Markup Language) for encoding documents electronically. XML design focuses on document design and it is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures. It is used in conjunction with XSL “Extensible Stylesheet Language” for transforming and rendering XML documents. What you need to understand about this design is that it is very efficient in the storage of information and provides a platform which allows for the maximum amount of information to be sent in the least amount of time. These efficiencies are very important in Emergency communications situation, where you are tasked to move a lot of information on frequencies that may have substantial network congestion.
0.1.1. Form Manager
When working with the “Form Manager” the user is given a listing of those documents currently existing on the DRATS system. The Form Manager lists the documents by ID and Title.
The user is given four choices (New, Edit, Delete and Close) from the initial Form Manager window. To create a new Message Template select “New”, to edit and existing template highlight your choice and select edit, to delete a template select the template and select delete. To close the Form Manager select the close option.
 0.1.2. Creating or Editing a Form
When selecting the “New” option the following “Form Builder” menu is displayed. It is from this menu that the user will design a new form or modify an existing form.
By design the top three fields of the document are fixed by the application software: (Title, ID and Logo). The “Title Box” is used to set the document title, while the ID is basically the document name. The document ID needs to be unique, while the document title may be duplicated. The Logo is the path to your form Icons. The default path is “C:\Program Files\D-RATS\” (on Windows) it is recommended that you create an ICON directory at this location, and then put all you Icons/Logos in that newly created folder. The path on the Logo line would then read: Icon\filename.filetype. It should be noted that the application is capable to displaying most types of graphics: .jpg, gif (static or animated), tif, bmp and etc. It is capable of displaying an animated .gif. One caution is that graphics that are too big will overwhelm the form, so select an appropriate sized (approximately AAAxYYY) image. It should also be noted that the graphic is not sent as part of the form and that to work both the sender and the recipients must have the same graphics stored at the same path locations.
0.1.3. Form Elements
The form elements: ID, Type, Caption, Initial Value
On the bottom of the form there are three options: Save, Cancel and Preview:
When previewing a form there are four options: Cancel, Save, Export and Printable:
Along the right side of the “Form Builder” page there are five options:
0.1.4. Form Elements Types
From the above item the droop down list displays the following valid Field types. The Initial value is set using this menu.
The Caption strings are user defined and are displayed next to the input fields for each element in the form presented to the user.
0.1.5. Form Attachments:Each form is equipped with a fixed attachment block as follows:
Users can attach as many files as they would like, but it is advisable to keep the total size small. Users should know that DRATS running low speed DV mode are only capable of sending 950bps and computer files are shown in bytes. So a 10KB computer file is equivalent to approximately 80,000 bits. This means that to send that much information it is going to take approximately 84 seconds of dedicated transmission time. The larger the file the more problems you may experience on high usage transmission frequency. The block size that you have set in your preferences under the “transfers” section is also going to segment files based on the block size selected. This along with the files size and network congestion and retry sequences will determine the time it takes to transfer information.
As users attach files they are able to use the browse feature to located files. Once they get all of their attachment added, they will save them.
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| Last Updated on Monday, 14 September 2009 12:15 |
