Custom members

The Charta database is object oriented. This means that it consists of objects that refer to each other. An example is that an Assignment object refers to a Person object and a Weekly task object. These two represent the person who spent time and the task that has to be worked on. To use these objects in a planning, it must be possible to set the references between the different objects. Here we show how this can be done for a Weekly task and a Note.

In the previous example we gave you an exercise to make it possible to add a Note to a Weekly task. To finish the exercise, you must set object references in member fields.

• As an exercise add a global of type Note and open it in the control vault

Go to the globals section if you need some hints on how to do this. It should result in



• Check the high priority box
• Select the backup field, type "a" and press Spacebar

This will give the options for the field. Because the type of the field is defined as Person your options are all known Person objects. These are the Person objects within the global Persons. By typing "a" only the objects are shown for which the first fields starts with "a". You can also type the full name

• Select the person you want to be your backup for your tasks

You have now set a custom member, a reference to an instance of the Person class.

• Navigate to the explorer and press Enter on the Weekly tasks node

This will open a table with the tasks that are defined.

• Select a row with a task you want to add some information to and go to the note field

Because the note member of the Weekly task class is not automatically created, the application does not know what the field contains. So it is set to "Unknown".

• As an exercise make the field reference your My note object

This works in the same way as the backup you selected for yourself before. This should result in



• Select the note field and press Enter

This will open a new tab for the note object. Now you can check whether you referenced the right information.

Now that we have our data ready we can select or manipulate it by using procedural functions. How to get started in using functions is explained in the next example

Lessons learned

• Setting a charta reference to an object by using the drop-down list
• Jumping to an object by pressing Enter on the reference field
• A general rehearsal of globals, classes, members, types and the different controls