Tag Archives: Menu

Context Menu updates

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The next release of OpenInsight sees a few updates to context menus and the ContextMenu Designer, so in this post we’ll take a brief look at these upcoming changes.

Moving the focus

One important aspect of standard Windows context menu behavior is that the focus is moved (if possible) to the control that the menu belongs to. Current versions of OpenInsight do not follow this pattern so the next release includes a fix for this, and this is something you should be aware of just in case it impacts your application (though to be honest, we’re not really expecting it to!).

Test-Run support

The Context-Menu Designer now supports the IDE “Test-Run” feature, so that you can see how your context menu will appear when you use it in your application.

When you test-run your context menu you will see a simple dialog box with an edit control (EDL_TEST) and and a static control (TXT_TEST) like so:

Test-run context menu dialog box

Right-clicking either of these controls displays your context menu:

Selecting an item displays it’s fully-qualified name, which has the standard format of:

<windowName> "." <controlName> ".CONTEXTMENU." <itemName>

So, for the test run dialog, it will be one of the following:

"RTI_DSN_CONTEXTMENU_TESTRUN.EDL_TEST.CONTEXTMENU." <itemName>
"RTI_DSN_CONTEXTMENU_TESTRUN.TXT_TEST.CONTEXTMENU." <itemName>

E.g.

Message box showing the name of the menu item that was clicked

Common menu support

The initial release of the ContextMenu Designer in v10.0.8 included check-boxes for two “common menu” options as shown in the screenshot below. Each of these options appends a set of standard menu items to your context menu, and both have been enhanced for the next release and include new artwork as well.

Shows the Content Menu designer with the "Include OI Menu" and "Include Windows Menu" check-boxes highlighted.

The “OI Menu” appends the following items:

  • Options – Display options for the current control.
  • Help – Display help for the current control.
  • Data Binding – Display data-binding information for the current control.

Whilst the “Windows Menu” appends the following standard “Edit” items instead:

  • Undo
  • Cut
  • Copy
  • Paste
  • Delete
  • Select All

In both cases the default system CONTEXTMENU event (i.e. the event responsible for actually displaying the menu) synchronizes the items to the parent control by using the HELPFLAGS and EDITSTATEFLAGS properties respectively.

(The definition for these items can be found in the SYSPROG “OIMENU_” and “WINMENU_” ContextMenu entities respectively – you may adjust these if you wish, but be aware that they may be overwritten in future OpenInsight updates, so you should make copies in your own application).

The @MENUPARENT pseudo-control name

When using QuickEvents there are several pseudo-control names you can use, such as “@WINDOW”, “@FOCUS” and “@SELF”, that are resolved to a “real” control name at runtime.

However, in order to be able to reference the context menu’s parent control at runtime we’ve introduced a new pseudo-control name called “@MENUPARENT”. This resolves to the name of the control displaying the menu and should be used in place of “@FOCUS” because it is perfectly possible for controls that don’t accept the focus (like Static Text controls) to have a context menu, and @FOCUS would not resolve to the correct value. Note that @MENUPARENT can only be used with MENU QuickEvents for context menu items – it cannot be used with any other type or event.

Shows the @MENUPARENT pseudo-control name being used for a menu QuickEvent

Context menus are an essential part of modern user interface design and we encourage you to use them as much as possible in your own applications – hopefully you’ll find that the tools provided in OpenInsight 10 make this easy to achieve!

Menu Designer update in v10.0.8

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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

ContextMenu 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

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!