Guiões de Interacção

A GI tipically describes a subdialogue in the interface. Three types of Scripts were considered:

DECISION - this type of GI is used to structure the dialogue, tipically they guide the user to an operation that he/she wants to execute.
SYNTH - this type of GI describes the dialogue that leads to the invocation of an operation.
VALSYNTH - this type is similar to SYNTH but returns the value obtained from the execution of the operation.

A GI is divided into two main components (see GI 1 and GI 2): the declarations component, and the behaviour describing component. Each component has various clauses. We will now list the ones that are common to all GI types.

The Declarations Component always includes the declaration:

of the type of the GI (TYPE);
of the identifying symbol (SYMBOL);
of the external GIs used (EXTERNAL);
of the locally declared GIs used (SUBGI);
of the local variables (STATE-CTRL);
of the application variables used (STATE-APL).

The Behaviour Component includes the declaration:

of a context condition that defines if the GI may be activated (CONTEXT);
of the description of the event sequence that the GI acepts (EVSEQ).

For the variable declaration it is possible to use the data types declared in the application and the predefined data types of the GIs, which are:

Integers (INT);
Strings (STR);
Booleans (BOOL);
Symbols of XMetoo (SYMB).

The declaration in STATE-CTRL can be done in two ways:

var: type - a variable named var of type type;
var1 <= var2 - the variable var1 local to the GI is inicialized with the value of the application variable var2.

Jose Franscisco Creissac Campos
Wed Jan 31 21:20:05 MET 1996