How To: Utilizing Mouse-Over Help
From jVantage
The encircled i icon to the left of the field prompts indicate that mouse-over help is available for the corresponding field. Placing your mouse over this icon will cause the mouse-over help to be displayed as shown in Illustration 5. Adding mouse-over help for a given field in your applications is as simple as keying the help text into the field definition form. This will be covered later in this document.
Internet Explorer Z-Order Work-Around
Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 and prior has a known bug related to the Z-Ordering of some control types. Certain elements, such as pull down lists, bleed through layers that should be displayed over them as shown in Illustration 6. This is a screen-capture of the same form displayed in Illustration 5. jVantage provides a feature for the z-ordering problem that can be activated via Properties that causes elements that are known to cause the bleed-through problem to be temporarily hidden while mouse-over help is activated. This feature can be disabled, but the alternative is to be careful in laying out your user interfaces to ensure that these problematic elements are not displayed in areas where they can cause the problem to surface. All mouse-over properties, such as fonts, background color, border color and so on, can be controlled using the MouseOverText property profile.
A final note regarding mouse-over help has to do with input field widths. If enabled via the MouseOverText property profile (it is enabled by default), the length of the field input (that is, the number of characters that a given input field can hold) is also displayed when mouse-over help is activated on an input form. This can be a handy feature for users of your applications because it provides guidance on how much data can be entered into a given field without simply reporting an error when users enter too much data. The input width is not applicable to all input control types, and it is only displayed on input forms. The same mouse-over text is displayed for the field on a regular views and input forms, but the input length is not be shown. Illustration 7 shows how mouse-over help looks when an input length is applicable – it says that the input field maximum width is 60 characters.
Help Template URLs and Themes are discussed in a separate section of this document. The remaining important topic on the create application form is the data source.
