Add Help Text to Your Workbook

You can add help text for business object fields you use in forms and tables in your workbook to provide help to your business users. Your users will see a popup with this help when they select a form field or column header in a layout.

You can also add help to:

• Custom actions
• Custom action payload fields
• Row finders
• Row finder variables
• Row variables

You can add help text for an individual field using the editor for that field. You can also copy descriptions included in the service metadata document to the relevant Help Text properties. For the steps to copy descriptions to help text, see Copy Descriptions to Help Text.

To add help text for an individual field, open the editor for the field and type help text in the Help Text field on the General tab, as shown here:

Help Text values, as well as Title values, can be localized. See Manage Workbook Translations.

Once configured, help text for business object and item-level custom action payload fields is displayed when the user selects the form field label or table column header in a layout.

Help text for custom actions and business object-level payload fields is displayed in the custom action wizard, either in the Description field for custom actions or in a popup when you hover over the payload field. Help text for row finders and variables is displayed in the Search Editor when you hover over the finder or variable label.

Copy Descriptions to Help Text

If desired, you can copy the Description property values to the Help Text properties for a given catalog.

When Oracle Visual Builder Add-in for Excel creates a catalog, it can harvest descriptions from the service's metadata and populate the description properties for various elements such as business object fields, custom actions and their payload fields, and row finders and their variables.

These descriptions may be technical in nature and might not be suitable for business users. As a result, these descriptions are not displayed to business users and are not "localizable".

OpenAPI does not specify any property that corresponds to "help text". Furthermore, none of the supported REST frameworks provide help text or "tooltips" using x-hints, for example. As a result, the Help Text properties are empty for new catalogs.

If your REST service provides business-user friendly descriptions in the metadata, you can copy these values to the help text properties in one go.

Before you begin, make a backup copy of the source workbook in case you don't like the results.

To copy descriptions for a catalog to the help text properties:

1. Click Manage Catalogs.
2. From the Manage Business Object Catalogs window, select the desired catalog from the list.
3. Click the Menu icon (), then select "Copy Descriptions to Help Text" from the popup menu.
4. When prompted to confirm the operation, click Yes.
5. When the copying is complete, review the Help Text values in the catalog to make sure they are appropriate for your workbook's users.

   Note:

   You may need to remove markup since the help text values are displayed as is.

When you've copied the descriptions over and refined the Help Text values as you see fit, you might want to consider translating these text strings into other languages. See Manage Workbook Translations.