COMMENTS
The COMMENTS attribute displays a message on the Comment line at the bottom of
the window. The message is displayed when the cursor moves to the specified
field, and is erased when the cursor moves to another field.
field-tag is the field tag that you declared in the SCREEN section.
message is a character string enclosed in quotation marks.
The message must appear between quotation ( " ) marks on a single line of the
form specification file.
The most common application of the COMMENTS attribute is to give information
or instructions to the user. This is particularly appropriate when the field
accepts only a limited set of values. (See the description of the INCLUDE
attribute later in this section for details of how to specify a range or a list of
acceptable values for data entry.)
4GL programs can use the same screen form to support several distinct tasks
(for example, data input and query by example). Do not specify the COMMENTS attribute in a field description unless the
message is appropriate to all of the tasks in which the message can appear.
If the same field requires a different message for various tasks, you should
specify each message using the MESSAGE or DISPLAY statements, rather than in the
form specification file.
Related Attributes