User messages
There are any number of messages that a form may be required to display to a user to explain a problem or to alert the user to a noteworthy situation. It is a common situation for multiple forms to be required to display some of the same messages.
Many of these messages have a fixed part that is
always the same and a variable part that may be different each time
the message is generated. To clarify this distinction between the
fixed and variable parts of a message, consider this example. Suppose
you want to generate a message that looks like this:
- Your start date 03/08/2014 must be before your end date 02/15/2014.
The fixed part of this notification
would probably be:
- Your start date _______ must be before your end date ________.
The variable part of the message would
be the pieces of text that get put in the blanks. In the case of the
preceding example, these would be:
- 03/08/2014
- 02/15/2014
The mechanism that satisfies these
needs involves two kinds of records that play different roles in the
message creation process:
- triUserMessage
- triUserMessage records are templates for messages. The fixed portion of a message's content is specified by a User Message record.
- triUserMessageHelper
- triUserMessageHelper records supply the variable part of a message's content.