Trilogy Dialogs

Video 1 (17MB) Creating Simple Dialogs

Video 2 (11MB) Passing Field Values

Video 3 (12MB) Checkboxes & Radios

Video 4 (31MB) Dropdown Lists

Video 5 (12MB) Validating Dialog Data

Using Trilogy you can define dialogs to front-end your server-side UDPs quickly and easily using simple plain-text layouts. Simply type your text, defining fields with [ and ] characters, radio buttons with o's and checkboxes with x's. The dialog is defined on the server and is translated into a GUI by the Trilogy client when the UDP is invoked. This means that dialogs are created once and are immediately visible across your entire client user-base with no software to distribute or code to write.

Figure 1: Define a dialog on the server with simple plain-text.

Since the dialog is defined on the server, it means that changes to the user interface to a UDP can be done quickly and from a single location, just like changing the server UDP itself.

Figure 2: GUI Dialogs are created at run-time from the server-based dialog definition

Data-entry fields can be turned into drop-down lists, entered data can be validated and fields can be pre-populated, all with server-side scripts. Trilogy populates environment variables with the contents of the GUI before invoking the server-side script. This means it is easy to read the entered information from the GUI as well as the standard input and command line parameters as passed by Harvest.