2.12 Checking and Annotating Documents

The Document menu  contains the following entries.

• Document Info.  Pops up a text view dialog that contains some information about the tool and the document that is being edited.

  The following information about the current tool session is given:

  • Tool name and version.
  • File format version. This is the file format that the tool generates. The tools are supposed to read all file format versions less than or equal to that version.
  • The Unix login name of the user running this editor.
  • The current date and time.
  • The project (working) directory.
  • How many changes (in terms of how many edit operations) were made to the current document after it was created or read in.
  It shows the following information about the document being edited:
  • Document type.
  • Document name.
  • Unix login name of the author. This is the login of the user that created the document.
  • Date and time of creation.
  If the document was read from a file, it also shows:
  • Unix file name from which the document was loaded.
  • The file format version found in that file.
  • Tool that wrote the file.
  • Date and time when the file was written by the tool.
  Except the current document name, none of these values can be changed from within the tool. Note that by default the name of the document is equal to the file name when it is saved. When a document file is loaded and it contains a document name that is different from the file name (because the file had been renamed), a question dialog is raised which gives the user the choice between these two names for the new document name.
•   Check Document. Shows the result of the checks for soft constraints (constraints that can be temporarily violated) in a text view dialog. You should correct the errors yourself. The checks are specific for the concerning document type, so check out the section in this manual where that type of document is explained. For an example of the result of checking an erroneous data flow diagram see figure 2.9.

  
  

    

  Figure 2.9: The result of check document on a DFD.

  
  
  
•    Annotate Document. Pops up a text edit dialog for giving the document an annotation. This is free text and can for example contain the description or purpose of the document, the history of the document or references to other documents. The annotation text can be loaded from an ASCII file, saved to an ASCII file and printed (as Postscript). Furthermore, it is possible to Cut or Copy (a part of) the text to the Motif clipboard and it is possible to paste the text from the clipboard in another text edit window. So for example, when you want to add annotation text as a comment to a diagram, you can select the text by dragging with mouse button-1 (the selected text is shown in reverse video) and copy the text from the annotation text edit dialog to the clipboard. Then you open the out-line editor of the comment node (the in-line editor toggle should be off), and you choose Paste from the Edit menu of the out-line editor, the text is pasted from the clipboard into that window. When you press the OK button of the out-line editor, the text appears as a comment node.

Both Document Info as Check Document use a text view dialog  which resembles a text edit dialog except that the text is read-only. So you cannot edit the text (also including Cut, Replace and Paste) and you cannot load text from file. It further works pretty much the same as a text edit dialog. Text view dialogs are also used for the on-line help.