Basically i want a help box to show on each form that is filled by a predefined text that is pulled from a 'help' table. but i want there to be only one record on this table and for each page to pull out a specific field out of that record. e.g.on the 'products' page there will be a fly view of the text in the 'products help' feild from row '1' and i want it to always display row 1s data. Please help... surly it possible to do this?

Please help, there must be a way to do this...

Can you be more precise please ?
I didn't got the point.

For sure, it doesn't seems complicated.

Ok so say i've got a table in my component called 'Help' in which I have a feild for each of the other tables in my component e.g. 'Customers Help', 'Products Help', and 'Meal Categorys Help' each of these is a string. Now what i want is to display these strings on their relevent pages. e.g. On the Customers page I want the string for 'Customers Help' from the 'Help' table to display and on Products page i want the 'Products Help' string to display. also i should add that in the 'Help' table i want it so that their can only be one entry that the user has to edit to change the 'Help' string for each page. I know i could quite easily do something like this using the language files, but i want the user to be able to input their own help text for each page. do you understand what I'm getting at here? would appreciate the help a lot. cheers

In future, Cook will provide customizable areas of text.

Well.
For now, you need to query your help table for each page.
Add a Where statement (to filter the proper item for each page)
Display the string in each template page.

Do you know how to query and filter easily using the model ?

No unfortunatly this is one of the parts of making the component i haven't ventured into yet, if you were able to show me an example i imagine i could work it out?

Simple :

Hi sorry to be a further pain, and this is probably really obviouse but alas i am a total noob when it comes to codeing in joomla. I understand your code and what it does but where do i add it, i assume you ment in the relevant item model, but where in that file should i add it too? one of the pre-existing functions? or do i need to create a new function? if so what do i call it or if its to pre-existing function, which one?

You put this code in your view file (view.html.php) in the display_xxxx() function.
Then, you send the resulted var to the template with :
$this->assignRef('myObject', $myObject);

So, in your template file, you can access the var :
$this->myObject


Do you need help to construct your SQL query ?

Hi thanks for the reply I'm still struggling to get it to work though so heres my query:

$db = JFactory::getDBO() ;
$db->setQuery( "SELECT fldproductshelp FROM #__catering_help WHERE id = 1" );

$help = $db->loadResult();

$this->assignRef('help', $help);

Is this correct?...

Then this is what it looks like in the function:

function display($tpl = null)
{
$layout = $this->getLayout();
switch($layout)
{
case 'productsitem':

$fct = "display_" . $layout;
$this->$fct($tpl);
break;
}

$db = JFactory::getDBO() ;
$db->setQuery( "SELECT fldproductshelp FROM #__catering_help WHERE id = 1" );

$help = $db->loadResult(); // if you select ONLY ONE data

$this->assignRef('help', $help);

}

Is this correct?...

Finally I assumed when you say template file that i use the item_fly for that section and i've tried just using:

<?php $this->myObject ?> - Where i want the string to display

and also ive tried:

<?php echo JDom::_('html.fly', array(
'dataKey' => '_lsthelpsave_fldproductshelp',
'dataObject' => $this->help
));
?>

But neither way has worked. Any pointers or any help is really fully appreciated. Have you thought about doing any tutorials for codeing in the component? I understand your really busy with j-cook development but haveing a few tutorials might help slow down the amount of questions being asked in the forums. I find tutorials best for getting concepts and processes to stick in my mind, as long as they have a bit of explanation. anyway any help whatsoever would be amazing! cheers in advance.

any additional help would be very much appreciated.

I stil can't progress with this concept of putting in where querys into my components, its something i realy need to be able to do to complete multiple components. any help or documentation of any kind would be really really helpfull as there is not much that I can find anywhere on the internet. i think my biggest problem is where to place the relevent code as i am not grasping the MVC architecture of joomla. please any help would be really really appreciated.

Thanks