MESSAGE
The MESSAGE
instruction displays a message
to the user.
Syntax
MESSAGE expression [
,...]
[
ATTRIBUTES ( display-attribute [
,...]
) ]
{
BLACK |
BLUE |
CYAN |
GREEN
|
MAGENTA |
RED |
WHITE |
YELLOW
|
BOLD |
DIM |
INVISIBLE |
NORMAL
|
REVERSE |
BLINK |
UNDERLINE
|
STYLE = "style-name"
}
- expression is any expression supported by the language.
- style-name is a presentation style name.
Usage
The MESSAGE
instruction
displays a message to the user in an interactive program.
In TUI mode, the text is displayed in the message line of the current window. The message line
can be defined by the OPTIONS MESSAGE
LINE
instruction. Note that the default message line position is the same as the
MENU
option comment line.
In GUI mode, the text is displayed in a specific area, depending on the STYLE
attribute.
When you specify the STYLE
attribute, you can reference a style
defined in the presentation styles file. This allows you to display errors or messages in GUI mode
with more sophisticated visual effects than the regular TTY attributes. Advanced automatic rendering
can be obtained with message specific style attributes. If you want to apply a style automatically
to all program messages displayed with the MESSAGE
instruction, you can use the
:message
pseudo selector in
the style definition.
Example
INPUT BY NAME custrec.* ...
BEFORE INPUT
MESSAGE "Enter customer data."
...