Advanced Oracle PL/SQL Programming with Packages

17.4. Using PLVhlp

There are two aspects to using the PLVhlp package:

1. Display help text using the show and more procedures. In the PLVhlp architecture, help text is stored with the program unit it documents in specially formatted comment areas. The show and more procedures then access that text. You can also fine-tune the display of help text by setting the size of a page of text.

2. Create help text to be inserted into stored code for use as online help text. For more details on how to set up this help text, see the sections Section 17.4.3 and Section 17.5.

These aspects are covered in the following sections.

17.4.1. Showing the Help Text

The show program initiates the display of help text on a topic. Its specification is as follows:

PROCEDURE show (context_in IN VARCHAR2, part_in IN VARCHAR2 := c_main);

where context_in is the context or program unit that contains the text and part_in is the specific topic to be displayed in response to this request. The following call to show, for example, requests that the help text in the PLVprs package specification covering the topic "examples" be displayed.

SQL> exec PLVhlp.show ('s:PLVprs', 'examples');

PLVhlp predefines two constants for commonly used help text topics: top-level or main help and examples help. The last call to PLVhlp.show could be rewritten using one of those constants as follows:

SQL> exec PLVhlp.show ('s:PLVprs', PLVhlp.c_examples);

You might even consider adding constants to the PLVhlp package to make it easier to ...