Alventis Memos support Hyperlinks of several flavors. On the whole, the way they work is very similar to what is commonly found in other word processors. Invoking a Hyperlink may be a bit different though. When a Memo is in a saved state, clicking on the link with the mouse is sufficient. In a modified Memo, you must hold down the Ctrl key while clicking the link to activate it. Regular clicking simply places the cursor at the point you click.

Insert/Edit Hyperlink allows you to create and edit Hyperlinks. If you invoke this command with the cursor on an existing Hyperlink, you will get a chance to edit it. If the cursor is not on an existing link, you will have an opportunity to create a new Hyperlink from scratch. The only difference between the above two scenarios is whether you are modifying an existing link or creating a new one – the interface and the procedure are exactly the same, so we'll discuss both at the same time.

Clicking on the aforesaid button opens a dropdown dialog that looks like this:

Note that while the dialog's behavior resembles that of InstaButton dialogs (it gets dismissed if you click outside of it), the Insert/Edit Hyperlink button is not an InstaButton.

The Hyperlink Caption MRU Combo Box allows you to edit or create a Caption for your Hyperlink, i.e., the text that will appear in the Memo.

The Hyperlink Target MRU Combo Box allows you to specify the actual link target. More on that later. Let's finish with the few remaining controls first.

The 3 buttons under the combo boxes select the colors you'd like your Hyperlink's Caption to have.

Normal Color is the color of the Hyperlink that just "sits quietly" in its Memo.

Hover Text Color and Hover Background are the colors the Hyperlink is painted with when you pass the mouse cursor over the link or place the editing caret in it. This is very much like it works in your favorite Web browser.

Note that you can change many of the link's font attributes outside of this dialog (we'll tell you how in a bit) but it is only here that you can specify its Normal and the two Hover colors.

Hyperlink Targets.

While we're still in the Hyperlink dialog, let's discuss what sort of things you can create links to. But first, the good news: you can create Hyperlinks by hand as much as you want, but there are several easier ways to create them using several simple command buttons. We'll talk about them later.

URL Hyperlinks. These would be the Web links. Some examples are:

www.alventis.com

http://www.alventis.com

http://www.google.com/search?q=Alventis

mailto:someone@somewhere.com

...and whatever else can be interpreted by your default Web browser.

File Hyperlinks. You can create links to files on your computer.

The Target will look something like this:

C:\Path\FileName.txt

"C:\Program Files\Another\File.xyz"

Note that file names that include spaces must be enclosed in double quotation marks. The filenames must be specified in a way that will be understood by the Operating System if it tries to open that file from the Alventis application directory. This is guru territory though, and you should normally specify the full filename with the full path – as in the above examples.

You can insert links to files by Alt-dropping a file from, e.g., Windows Explorer: start dragging a file as usual, but make sure you hold down the Alt key when dropping the file in the Memo. If you don't hold down the Alt key, Alventis will attempt to insert the contents of the file into the Memo - if it is of a recognized type (TXT, RTF, Pictures).

If you are really brave, there's a special expert feature for you. Please note that it is relatively advanced and assumes that you know how to execute programs from the command line. If this is not the case, you can safely skip this section and go straight to the one on Record Hyperlinks.

You can specify not merely document-type files (TXT, DOC, various image files, to name a few possibilities) as Targets, but applications too. For instance, you could set the Target to:

Calc

That's right, this would be enough to open the Windows Calculator directly from a Memo. You don't have to specify the .exe extension in this case: Windows assumes it by default. That's nice, but what if you were even braver and wanted to launch a program with command-line arguments? No problem: just enter the link Target as you would enter the command in the Run dialog. If the executable contains spaces, you must enclose it in double quotes. Technically, everything after the first space which is not within the enquoted executable's name, is treated as the parameter string. The following are some valid examples:

Notepad C:\SomePath\FileName.txt

Notepad "C:\Path with spaces\File.txt"

"C:\Some path with spaces\Program.exe" param1 param2

Record Hyperlinks. Last but not least, you can have links to records within Alventis itself.

The format for such links is:

intralink://Zero.DBID.TableID.RecID

Zero is just that: number 0, always the same.

DBID is the ID number of the Database.

TableID is the ID of the Table.

RecID is the ID of the Record in that Table.

So, if you wanted to create (by hand) a Hyperlink to Record 23 of Table 5 of Database 2, the link Target would look like this:

intralink://0.2.5.23

As promised, let's see now how we can create some of the above Hyperlinks without tediously typing their Targets by hand.

Insert Link to File button does precisely that: it allows you to simply pick a file from the standard Open dialog box – and the link is created for you. The button remembers the most recently inserted links, so you can re-insert a link by simply picking it from the little menu that opens when you click the little arrow on the right-hand side of the button.

Insert Link to Record drops down a menu with a list of all currently open records. Convenient if you want to link to another record open in another InfoView.

If the record you want to link to is not currently open but appears in the Search Results in a UniGrid, then all you need to do is drag-and-drop that record into the Memo.

The Convert Link to Text button does not insert a link at all but let's get it out of the way. It simply takes all Hyperlinks within the selected text (or absent that, the one the cursor is on), and converts them to plain text of the form Caption (Target). This may be useful if, e.g., you want to print some text that contains Hyperlinks and you want to see the actual Targets and not just their Captions in the printout.

Inserting Web links is not too difficult either. In Microsoft Internet Explorer, for example, select one or more Hyperlinks and copy-and-paste the selection into a Memo. You can also use drag-and-drop. In Mozilla Firefox, copy-and-paste inserts merely the text, so you lose all link Targets. Drag-and-drop of a single link does work though. Unfortunately, Opera doesn't help you with the task of Hyperlink insertion: drag-and-drop doesn't work at all, and copy-and-paste only gives us the text. So, if Opera is your favorite, you'll have to resort to inserting Hyperlinks manually: right-click on the link and select Copy link address from the popup menu, and then use the Insert/Edit Hyperlink button to insert it into the Memo.

You can paste the HTML-formatted contents of the clipboard into the Memo using the Paste in Memo as HTML command . Note that if the clipboard does not contain any HTML, the command will do nothing - even if the clipboard contains some other recognizable formats (e.g., plain text or RTF).

You can also try to import the entire HTML file into the Memo, but this is a subject of an entirely different chapter called Memo Import/Export.

Hyperlink Formatting. You can change the Hyperlink's colors via the Insert/Edit Hyperlink dialog (which is the only place where you can set them), but you can adjust the link's appearance directly as well. Simply place the cursor anywhere within the Hyperlink (or select any part of it) and use all the usual formatting tools: Font, QuickStyle, etc.