Introduction
These few pages are intended to provide you with some extra help
and guidance installing CASCADE on your home or work PC. Much of what
you will find below is also included in on-line help, but having it
in writing should help you to get to on-line help.
There are four sections in this document
–system requirements,
software installation,
the login process,
and using help.
There are three basic requirements:
Installing CASCADE to your machine should be a very simple operation. We use the same "Installshield" software system you have seen on most any other package you have installed. Unless you have special system requirements, simply click on "Next" or "Ok" each time you are asked a question. The total installation process will take 2-5 minutes.
After you have downloaded them from the HTTP or FTP site, you should have four folders named DISK1, DISK2, DISK3 and DISK4 in the directory where they are saved.
After you double click in the setup program, you will be taken through the standard install process. This will include the use of the InstaShield code that will allow you to easily uninstall CASCADE at a later date.
After setup is completed, CASCADE should have been installed as an option in your startup menu. If not, your system administrator has protected the menu in some way. If this is the case, the easiest way to do is to create a shortcut on your desktop. You do this by going to the install directory (via "My Computer"), clicking on the CASCADE executable, and dragging it to the desktop. It will create a shortcut icon on your desktop.
One thing to remember when you are going to run the "CASCADE client" is that you must have established an internet connection. This is required because you will need to communicate with "CASCADE server" during your CASCADE session. CASCADE will not initiate DIAL-UP networking for you.
When you start CASCADE, a login window will appear on your screen. There three areas to be filled: login name, password, and server.
You should enter the user name and password given to you. You may tab between the fields. If this is the first time you login to Cascade, then you need to fill in the server area. This is a simple operation. Click on the "Server" dropdown menu, and choose "Set New Server."
You should be given a host and port number by your system administrator; Type them into the appropriate spaces, give it any name you want. "Save" it, and then "Close" it.
You will see the login screen again, this time with the server area already filled. The next time you login, you will see the server name is already in its server area.
In most cases,
there will be only one choice so you may tap the enter key or click on the
"Ok" button. Once you have done this, the CASCADE Client and
server will exchange a number of information items and will down load a
lot of project information and open up the main CASCADE screen.
Note: If you had the incorrect login name and/or password, you
will still be in the login screen. If you had set the server
incorrectly, CASCADE will crash.
Once you are in CASCADE main screen, before you go much further, you might want to take a second to learn a little more about the CASCADE help system. We would suggest that you start by going to the "Navigation" menu and opening up the table of contents. You will see that there are several "help documents" for CASCADE, and each of them has a number of sections in it. You are currently reading "Preparing the System". There are other documents on "Getting Started with CASCADE", "CASCADE Features", etc. The books are fully woven together like an encyclopedia. Notice the arrows at the bottom of this window, with the word entry between them. If you kept pressing the arrow pointing to the right, you would go linearly from this page 1 all the way to the last page of the first document. You would then need to open the first page of the second document using the table of contents window.
With the Table of Contents open, you can select one or more books in the top window. The bottom window will show you the full table of contents for the selected book or books. Don't get confused by the fact that each book starts its table of contentsnumbering back at 1.
Three last comments about help before we go on. First, as CASCADE evolves, but not in this version, it will open help at the place it thinks you want to start based on what you were doing. For now help will always start here, so knowing about the table of contents is important. Second, CASCADE help is hypertext based. The text that appears in red are hypertext links that will jump you to some other point in the document. Once you have jumped with a hypertext link, it will be hard to get back to where you jumped from because as you may remember, the arrows at the bottom take you to the previous or next section in the linear order. For hypertext jumps, you will use the "Back" option that appears in the navigation menu. Third, and finally for now, note that there is a search option in the navigation menu. While the current version has not fully implemented keyword searching we have begun the process of linking in this feature so you may wish to give it a try.
