Owner's Manual (Complete)

Chapter 18—Date Book
The Home Control Assistant 3
This dialog box has six main elements.
 The calendar at the top—where you select the date for this entry.
 The Headline box—this is where you type your entry. The headline is what you see in the
HCA display pane. HCA displays the headline in as large a font as possible to fit the display:
the longer the headline, the smaller the font. Short headlines are best.
 More Information box—allows you to add additional information about any entry. This
information does not show up in the display.
However, when your headline appears in the display pane, you can
see this information. Right
click the display pane (when the headline is shown) and select
More Info from the popup
menu. Obviously, if you do not enter any additional information, there is nothing to see, so
the
More Info choice in the popup menu is unavailable.
 The Reoccurs each year check box—to indicate that this date is significant every year.
 The name and value are used in conjunction with the Visual Programmer. You can write
programs that do different things on different days. Rather than having the program test the
date directly, you can have it test to see if a specific date book entry has come up. The name
and value are used with the Test element to make these sorts of tests. For example, you could
have a number of days in the date book set up so that when they come up, they all set the flag
SpecialDay to Yes. A program could test for the flag SpecialDay having the value Yes or No
and do different actions based upon the outcome of that test.
To create a new entry for a particular date
1. Use the mouse pointer to click and highlight the date for your entry.
2. Tab, or move your cursor to the Headline box where you type the information you want in
your message.
3. Tab, or move the cursor to the More information box, and type additional information
pertinent to this date.
4. If this event happens on this date every year, you may want to click the Reoccurs each year
checkbox.
In the coming years, HCA continues to display, on the appropriate date, entries you have
marked as reoccurring. Entries not marked as reoccurring are not displayed in subsequent
years.
5. Enter the name of a flag and the value to set it to when this date book entry happens. Leave
blank if you don’t need this.
6. Check your entry, and if it is correct, click OK to close the dialog box.
Hint: Although the daily message is limited to displaying one event per day, with the Date Book,
you can create as many entries for the same date as you want.
Changing and deleting entries
If you find that you have made an error, or want to update an entry, you can do so with the Change
button.
To change an entry in the Date Book
1. Select the entry that you want to change in the Date Book. Click the correct month tab and
click the entry to highlight it.
2. Click the
Change button. The Date Book Entry dialog box opens, displaying the message,
and any additional information that you included.