Designing Menus

The Menu Design command from the File menu enables you to easily create and customize a menu bar for your painted screen.

Menu Design provides the following features for developing a menu.

• Menu bar creation

• Up to 20 levels of submenus

• Automatic insertion of standard Help and Window menus

• Description (text) associated with a menu command

• Link to online help for a menu command

• Shortcut keys associated with a menu command

• Ability to make menu commands checked, disabled, or invisible

• Security governing who can view or use a menu

• The following menu accelerator keys options.

  • Ctrl+0 through Ctrl+9

  • Ctrl+Shift+A through Ctrl+Shift+Z

  • Ctrl+Shift+0 through Ctrl+Shift+9

  The JADE Painter Menu Design form displays:

  • A list of accelerators that are available for use for the current selected menu item. This list contains any alphabetic characters in the menu captions that are not used as an accelerator in any other peer menu item.

  • Top‑level menu item accelerators of any superclass forms are excluded from the list if the menu item is a top‑level item. Subclass forms are not considered.

  • The accelerators used for any menu items in the same submenu list are excluded if the menu item is a submenu.

  • A message, in red, if the currently selected menu item has an accelerator that is duplicated in any peer menu item. This is a warning only. Duplicated accelerators are permitted and handled. The message includes the caption of the menu item that duplicates use of the accelerator key.

For a menu design example, see "Example of Designing a Menu", later in this chapter.