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Built In Help
The main areas of assistance available from the Help menu within E-Studio are E-Studio
Help, E-Basic Help, and PST Web Support.
E-Studio help provides information on the use of the E-Studio Graphical User
Environment(GUI). To access E-Studio Help, choose Help Topics from the Help Menu.
The three tabs provide three different ways to access information. You can search the
Contents, Index, or use the Find feature. The first time you use Find, you will need to
build an index. This just takes a moment. If you need general information on a topic, the
Contents or Index may be best. For specific information, the Find feature is the quickest.
For example, suppose you need more information on how to load an image in the Image
Display object. You might start by looking at the property pages of the
ImageDisplayObject by bringing up the ImageDisplayObject in either the Contents or
Index. Note E-Prime uses typical programming formatting of naming objects with no
spaces between words and capitalizing the first letter of each word. In the Properties
section , the Filename property mentions the file name can be loaded from a List object.
Now you might either use the Contents to open the properties of a list object or use the
Find and type in Load to jump directly to the LoadMethod property of the List Object.
E-Basic Help will provide information needed when the built in GUI elements do not
provide the needed functionality. For example, using the UserBreakState to pause an
experiment requires use of E-Basic.
To access the E-Basic Help, choose E-Basic Help from the Help menu within E-Studio.
Note the help topics window shown is a screen shot, not the actual Help Topic Window.
To access the Help Topics, with the same three tabs as explained above, click on Help
Topics in the upper left corner. Alternately, all E-Basic topics are listed below.
For example, suppose you want to pause your experiment. You might go to the Find
tabpanel and type in pause. One of the items listed in the topics section is
GetUserBreakState, which we will discuss further below.
Example Experiments
The built in help may not provide all the details needed for implementation. The best way
to get that type of information is to look at an actual experiment that implements the
method you need more information on. E-Prime comes with several sample experiments
in the Shared Documents->Shared Experiments->Samples folder. Also, there are several
Sleep(200)
SetUserBreakState 0
End If
Pressing the pause keys causes the If statement to be evaluated as true. We then use
SetUserBreakState to set UserBreakState to zero. The while loop will evaluate to true
until the pause keys are pressed again. This is the typical usage of the pause keys, press
them once to enter the breakstate, press them again to leave the break state. The sleep
commands are used to avoid the possibility of triggering the user break state repeatedly.
Note the above code does not contain any code to inform the experimenter that the
program has paused. This can be added by adding the lines below directly after the If
statement:
'Display a message and sleep so the user will see it
Display.Canvas.Clear
Display.Canvas.Text 250, 100, "Pausing until ctrl+shift"
Note the top line is a comment, indicated by the single open quote.
The UserBreakState can also be used to terminate a portion of an experiment early:
'Terminate if user break
If (GetUserBreakState <> 0) Then 'Check for user break
TrialList.Terminate
End If
SetUserBreakState 0
in the Stimulus object. Thus, which of the four text boxes will be determined at run time,
based on the StateName attribute in the TrialList. In the Stimulus Object, you can inspect
the sub-objects for each state by clicking on the state tabs in the lower left corner. In the
image below, you will see the properties for the Left state are displayed.