Fields Menu

Required

This function set all of your fields to either required or not required. This saves you modifying all of your field one by one if you wanted to change them all.

List

This gives a summary of all of the fields that are currently in memory.

Select

Three further options will be given when you select this.

SELECT ALL will give each field a number depending on their ID number.

SELECT MANUALLY allows you to select the fields in your database individually. A new record will appear when you select this function. You must enter the priority number of the field next to the fields you wish to select. The order of the field selection is important, especially when sorting your records using the SORT function. The maximum priority number is the number of fields that you have, if you enter a number higher than this, it will become the maximum value possible. If you enter a priority that has already been entered in another field, it will be ignored and the entry will be blanked. Remember that top priority is number 1 and the last priority is the number of fields.

Info

This function gives information about a field. When you have selected this function, choose a field on screen that you want to get information about. A separate screen will be displayed. This will display relevant information according to field type etc.

Add

This adds a field to your database. This is how you must start a new database as no records can be created if there aren't any fields. Various questions will be asked about your new field in order to define it. Field type is the most important and effective question you must answer. You have a choice of 8 different fields types.

1. INDICATOR - This is just to place messages on the screen. No data can be entered into these fields. They are simply just to improve your databases.
2. ATTACHMENT - An attachment field allows you to attach images, samples, IFF animations, music modules and a user specified executable command lines. Remember that Play16 is required to play samples and FastView is required to view images. The attachment type MUSIC MODULE is used for both tracker and MED modules as Huge Base recognises which file type the music module is before it is loaded.
3. DATE - A date field contains a formatted date. The date is checked to make sure that you have entered it correctly. There are two types of date format that you can use. They are DD/MM/YYYY and DD/MON/YYYY. Examples of these are 01/01/1996 and 01/Jan/1996. Remember that if you do not know a section of a date or you want to miss it out, simply replace the unknown part of the date with dashes. E.g. If you don't want to enter the month name you may type something like 21/---/1978. This date would be accepted. The same applies to the other date format, DD/MM/YYYY. For that type of date format it's just one less dash, 21/--/1978.
4. ALPHANUMERIC - These fields can contain text, numbers and symbols.
5. TEXT - These fields contain text and symbols only. Numeric values are ignored.
6. NUMERIC - These fields can contain any type of number. This field is not formatted like a FLOATING POINT field or an INTEGER field. Whatever you type is accepted no matter how many decimal places it contains or if it is a whole number or not.
7. FLOATING - Floating point numbers are entered in these fields. When adding a field of this type you must also state how many decimals places you want to the right of the decimal point. This fields is automatically formatted so you will always have the correct amount of decimals places.
8. INTEGER - An integer number is formatted so that only whole numbers can be entered.

The ALPHANUMERIC and TEXT field types need to be formatted with one of five format modes. You will be asked to choose one of the following :-

1. NO FORMAT - This leaves what you have typed in the field and performs no formatting routine on the data at all.
2. UPPERED WORDS - This makes the start of every word an upper case letter and the rest lower case.
3. UPPERED FIRST - This makes the first letter of the data upper case and the rest lower case.
4. LOWER CASE - This makes all of the letters lower case.
5. UPPER CASE - This makes all of the letters upper case.

Clear

This clears a field of its data. The field is NOT deleted. After this function has performed, each record will have no data in the field that you cleared.

Modify

This allows you to modify a field. When changing field types, you may lose the data in the field. E.g. Changing from a text field to a numeric field would lose the data in that field. However, conversions are carried out if possible. E.g. Numeric fields being changed to a alphanumeric field would be okay as the conversion is possible.

Move

This allows to change the position of a field on the screen. You can press ESCAPE if you change your mind or you don't want to move it any more.

Delete

This completely deletes a field and it's contents. Be sure you want to delete a field as you probably have a lot of data in it!

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