We have developed a general method to handle helical tracks in a uniform magnetic field. The method allows us to propagate track parameters and their error matrix through materials, if any, to anywhere in the detector system in a simple and systematic way. We have then demonstrated that the pivot transformation technique greatly facilitates track manipulations such as track extrapolation, track linking, combined track fitting, vertex fitting, etc. We have described the procedures to achieve these tasks in detail and have summarized the necessary formulae. These formulae are genaral and applicable to any detector configuration, as long as the magnetic field is region-wise uniform so that the track follows a helical trajectory in each region.
We have also examined the high momentum limit, which simplifies the procedure significantly and provides a powerful analytic tool to estimate the performance of a system of tracking devices with an arbitrary configuration: we can estimate the effects of extra coordinate measurements or vertex constraints or combined track fitting on momentum resolution and impact parameter resolution, etc. In the course of this study, we have rederived some well known results in the light of our general method. As an application, we have proposed a simple Monte Carlo method to smear track parameters in accord with the spatial resolution and configuration of a given tracking system, taking into account the error correlations among the parameters and multiple scattering at detector walls or that in the detector sense volumes or both.