Adding or removing categories of information

The categories of information within an information class in the information center are defined by the contents of a class definition file in the directory html\en\navigation. A class definition file is a JavaScript file, such as Tasks.js, that can be edited using any ASCII editor. The names of the class definition files are contained in file html\en\navigation\Class.js as the first parameter in the invocations of the JavaScript function classDefn.

Each line in a class definition file is one of:

To remove an existing category you can either

To add a new category, simply add a new line to the class definition file containing an invocation of the function category. The five parameters to the function are:

  1. the name of the JavaScript file (in html\en\navigation) that contains the definition of the topics within the category
  2. a letter to be used as a keyboard shortcut for this category
  3. the text string that is to appear on the tab in the masthead
  4. the text character string that is to appear in the window status area when the mouse hovers over the tab in the masthead
  5. the pathname of the HTML file that contains the introduction to the category, relative to the directory html\en. It is recommended that you create a directory html\en\user to contain the HTML files for your new class.

The definitions of the existing classes (Tasks, Concepts and Reference) use internal variables to define the text string parameters. Rather than copying one of the existing categories you can use the following example as a guide:

newusercat = classDefn("mynewcat.js"
                      ,  "M"        //The letter M will be the short cut key
                      ,    "My new tab"    //The initial M will be underscored
                      ,      "My hover text"
                      ,        "user/mynewhome.html"
                      );