Version 10.0.8 has seen each of the Menu Designer tools (Form and Context) get a substantial overhaul, both to fix some bugs and also to improve their usability.  This post will provide a quick overview of what has changed.

The Context Menu Designer

Context Menu Designer

• The “Item Properties” have been moved from the IDE Property Panel onto the designer itself, adjacent to the menu structure outline.  The previous layout needed far too much mouse movement between the items and their properties.
• The ability to specify an image list for the menu has been added (this has always been supported at runtime but was not exposed via the Menu Design tools).
• Re-added the “OI Menu” and “Windows Menu” options.
  • These are no longer global like they were in version 9.x, rather they are specific to the menu in question.
• Added back the leading “-” symbol for items that don’t have an image as per version 9.
• Added back the missing “F11” and “F12” Accelerator Key options
• Improvements to the validation of item properties, e.g:
  • Better generation of default Item IDs.
  • Better checks for duplicate IDs.
  • Prevent events for POPUP item types.
  • A warning message when indenting/un-indenting items will change the parent item type (for example, indenting an item could cause the preceding ITEM to become a POPUP which would remove any existing event code from it).
• Added “Shift-key” functionality to the buttons to control “insert before/after” operations (normal operation is “insert before”, pressing Shift changes them “insert after”), i.e:
  • Shift + Insert button for “insert after current item”.
  • Shift + Insert Separator button for “insert separator after current item”.
  • Shift + Paste button for “paste after current item”.
• Added a full keyboard interface for the menu item structure list-box:
  • F2 (or Double-Click) to edit Item text in place.
  • Enter to insert a new item after the current item and move automatically into  “edit mode” (as per “F2” above).
    • Down arrow on the last item will insert a new item as per above.
    • Esc on a new “untouched” item will delete it.
  • Left key to shift an item and any sub-items to the left (un-indent).
  • Right key to shift an item and any sub-items to the right (indent).
  • Del key to delete items and their child items.
  • Ctrl-C to copy an item and it’s sub-items to the Windows Clipboard.
  • Ctrl-X to cut an item and it’s sub-items to the Windows Clipboard.
  • Ctrl-P to Paste items from the Windows Clipboard into the menu structure.
• Added a context menu to the menu item structure listbox that duplicates the buttons, and adds the following operations:
  • Reset All Item IDs – processes the entire menu and changes all item IDs to their defaults based on their text and the name of their parent item.
  • Copy All – Copies all items to the Windows Clipboard – useful for duplicating menus from one form to another.
  • Delete All – Removes all items from the menu.
• You are not asked to save the details for each item as you select items in the designer, but you will be prevented from moving to a different item if there is a validation failure.

The Form Menu Designer

Form Menu Designer

Likewise the Form Menu designer has received the same treatment with a few additional extras:

• A tab has been added for maintaining Event Scripts.
• The events tab has colored indicators (orange and blue) to denote if an item has a QuickEvent or an Event Script.
• More validation:
  • Prevent Separators being top-level items.
  • Prevent events for top-level items (unfortunately they are not supported by the Presentation Server in this version).
• Syntax checking.
  • Syntax is automatically checked if you attempt to select another item – you will be prevented from moving to a different item if the check fails.

You should be able to catch these improvements in the next release, so please try them out and let us know how they work for you!