Iowa Terrace Version 4.1.1.

Introduction

The terrace program outlined in the following pages is an update of the previous version of the Iowa Terrace program. The program has been transferred from the QuickBasic 4.5 environment to the Microsoft Basic Professional Development System 7 environment to access the functions of this language. The user interface has been rewritten to allow the user to maneuver between screens with the use of function keys. The program makes use of 'pop-up' help screens that are displayed on the screen with the data previously displayed in the back ground. The program includes the option to design sediment and water control basins, viewing of files on disks, deletion of unwanted files and the viewing of the design on the screen prior to printing to the printer. The print out to the printer has been reduced to two pages for normal designs. The printouts include a Design and a Checkout sheet.

Equipment

The program has been written to operate in the MS-DOS environment. The program has been run on the PC 6300 and the Zenith LapTop computers with 640 K Ram. Graphics capability is not required with this program. The program was written in Microsoft Basic Professional Development System 7 and was compiled to maximize performance. A math co-processor is not necessary, but it would speed up the execution of the program.

Key Functions

This program has been written to be as "friendly" as possible. When a request for an answer is either "(Y/N)" the program will accept either upper of lower case characters. Most of the screens have an built in 'HELP' screen by pressing the function key F10. Function key F1 will back up one screen while function key F2 will move forward one screen.

Errors

Many error conditions have been trapped within the program. The errors that have occurred in Version 3.0 of this program have been rectified. Various messages will appear in order for the user to rectify errors prior to proceeding with the remaining parts of the program. A great deal of effort has been made to get the so called 'bugs' out of the program, but unforeseen and uncommon data entries or attempting to make the program do what it was not intended to do, may still create these 'bugs'. If an error occurs within the program, the error number will be displayed on the screen and upon pressing a key the program will attempt to return to the main menu.

Save Data

Terrace or Basin input data is saved to disk when the option 'S' (Save previously run job) is selected from the menu. The file extension assigned to this file is '.TDA'. If the hard disk has been selected for the filing of the data files, the file will be stored in the sub-directory '.\data' and if external drive 'A' has been selected for the files the file will be stored on the in the root directory of this drive. All data is stored in an ASCII format.

Programs

The terrace program makes use of one program.

1. TERRACE4.exe - this program includes all necessary modules to run the program.

Program support:
Norman Friedrich
Civil Engineer
120 N Industrial Prkwy #4
West Union, Iowa 52175
 

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