The Action Sets Dialog

Action sets are sets of instructions that will be read and processed by various programs, in order to produce output such as natural-language descriptions, or to carry out pre-defined operations in the interactive identification program, Intkey. Templates for various commonly used action sets are automatically included when a new dataset is created as described above. These templates are based on a subset of the action sets included in the sample data supplied with the programs (see Experimenting with the Sample Data). The sample data contain references to taxon names and to character and state numbers that will usually be inconsistent with or inappropriate for another data set. Rather than deleting directives containing such information, they have been turned into comments, in order to serve as examples.

'Grevillea.dlt [2] - Actions' dialog.

Heading (Action set:)

The 'Action set:' label displays a description of the selected action set (or directive file). This description is derived from the presence of a COMMENT or SHOW directive in the file contents. It identifies the action set that the buttons on the right hand side of the screen will act upon.

Tabs (Confor, Intkey, Dist, Key)

The tabs below the heading label sort the action sets into groups defined by the DELTA program that will be used if the action set is activated by use of the 'Run' button. The behaviour of these programs are described in the DELTA user guide.

The main table

The action-set descriptions shown in the column labelled 'Action' are taken from a 'COMMENT' or 'SHOW' directive at the start of each action set. The text in the 'File name' column is the internal file name of the action set, and also the name of the corresponding external file when the data are exported to DELTA text files. The 'Imported/exported' column show the date and time when the action set was most recently imported from or exported to its external counterpart.

The sets whose descriptions start with '~' are partial sets, which are incapable of producing output by themselves, but are invoked by other action sets.

The action buttons