4GL Help Numbers: Yuchh!

Hi family, I fishing for ideas again. Since I first experienced the 4GL HELP mechanism, with its help numbers hard-coded in the 4GL code, I have wished for help labels as strings. With strings I can use some kind of acronym for what the help message means, which module or component of the application the help message is for. I entered a feature request for such a modification to the help mechanism AGES ago but that has vanished down the oubliette. FourGen used a 4-part composite key (OK, 3 parts identify the body of help text) and this sounds pretty good in principle. However, the application I want to add help to was not generated with FourGen so this would be a mighty big wheel to reinvent. Another idea I had was to write my help source file similar to the 4GL help source, only using my desired acronyms instead of the hard-coded numbers. I would then pipe my help source through a perl script that would: 1. Assign [sequential] numbers to the acronym strings. 2. Insert the acronym/assigned-number into a database table. Of course, I could not use the HELP nnnn options in Input and menu commands; in all cases I would have to use ON KEY clauses. But since I have not written a blessed line of HELP code yet, this is not a major obstacle. Can anyone out there improve on or refine this? Has anyone done this already so that I don't have to reinvent a wheel? Thanks. -- -- Jake (In pursuit of undomesticated aquatic avians) +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Impeccable Logic: A thought process which successfully | | resists chicken bites | +-----------------------------------------------------------+