These four commands are essential in presenting user friendly and user-proof dialogs in HotDocs. When designing systems, it is generally best practice to show only those variables that require (or may require) an answer and HIDE or GRAY those that are irrelevant. HotDocs provides a rudimentary manner to handle this automatically, but if you are designing complex systems, you may need to use these four commands.
All of these instructions are used in dialog scripts only.
GRAY Var //grays Var, prohibiting data entry, but displaying the value (if any)
UNGRAY Var //UNgrays it, allowing data entry
HIDE Var //completely hide the variable
SHOW Var //opposite of HIDE
Here are some examples that should be fairly self explanatory…
//hide the company type, only showing it if relevant.
HIDE PARTY Entity Company Type MC
IF PARTY Entity Type MC = "Company"
SHOW PARTY Entity Company Type MC
REQUIRE PARTY Entity Company Type MC
END IF
//calculate a total amount, but gray it so it isn't editable
GRAY SALES Grand Total NU
SET SALES Grand Total NU TO ZERO ( SALES Amount NU ) + ZERO ( SALES Tax NU ) - ZERO ( SALES Discount NU )
//allow them to manually change it if they REALLY want to
IF SALES Grand Total Change TF = TRUE
UNGRAY SALES Grand Total NU
END IF
Instead of using a variable name, you can also substitute the “ALL” parameter....
GRAY ALL //grays everything on the dialog
UNGRAY ALL //ungrays everything
When building a system to really lockdown data entry, you may wish to write a dialog script something like this to force entry of everything in the correct order…
HIDE ALL
SHOW PARTY Entity Type MC
IF ANSWERED ( PARTY Entity Type MC ) //must have a type before we allow name entry
SHOW PARTY Name TE
IF PARTY Entity Type MC = "Company"
SHOW PARTY Entity Company Type MC
REQUIRE PARTY Entity Company Type MC
SHOW PARTY Entity Company Number TE
END IF
IF ANSWERED ( PARTY Name TE ) //must have a name before they can proceed further
//more SHOW/REQUIRE pairs here
END IF
END IF
All of these commands are dynamic as of HotDocs 6, which is a major step forward. Whilst they may look like eye candy, these instructions serve to produce better and more accurate documents every time, simply by forcing/prohibiting better data entry. When combined with REQUIRE, you really can obey the rule that “if a variable is visible, it must be answered and if it is invisible, it is irrelevant”. When your systems can follow this rule, your users do not have to have any knowledge of what they are working with or understand the sometimes complex concepts behind the scenes - all they need to know is that if it CAN be answered, it SHOULD be answered and if it cannot be seen, don’t worry about it.