Overview of the Toolbar and Menu Designer
You can access the Toolbar and Menu Designer (Toolbar Designer for short) as follows:
Toolbar and Menu Designer.The Toolbar Designer, shown in Figure 12–1, is a TreeView-based window. All the categories, items, bands, and toolbars you work with are represented as nodes in the left-hand TreeView control. The tab folders where you define these objects are displayed on the right when you select a particular node.
Categories, items, bands, and toolbars are all displayed in the TreeView control. Expanding a parent node in the tree shows the objects under that parent. The root node is always Toolbar and Menu Designer. The primary child nodes are item categories (which contain both categories and items), bands, and SmartToolbars.
Note: Since menu and toolbar information is cached, it is necessary to clear the cache to notice your changes. You can either restart the session or clear the cache by deleting the persistent procedureadm2/toolbar.p using the Procedure Object viewer. Ensure that no windows that use a toolbar are open in the AppBuilder when deleting that procedure.
By default, the Toolbar Designer shows objects from all product modules. To organize toolbar objects that you create, you should generally assign them to a particular module. To do this, select a module from the drop-down list before you start defining items, bands, and SmartToolbars. If you do this, it will be easier to locate and maintain your objects later. Since the framework itself defines a great many items, bands, and toolbars for the framework tools themselves, you will see all of these along with your own if you do not filter the objects by module. In many cases, however, you will want to integrate some of these built-in objects into your own toolbars. In this case, you must reset the Module drop-down list to <All> because these objects are not part of any particular module.
Selecting the Refresh button in the designer’s toolbar causes all nodes in the tree to collapse and refreshes the contents of the tree.
The Search button brings up the Search Nodes dialog box where you can search for bands that contain a specific item. For example, in Figure 12–2 you can see that the First menu item in the Navigation category is used in two different bands, called Navigation and NavRight (shown in the Bands browser).
If you select an item from the SubMenu category, you can use its label in other bands as the band label or submenu. In this case, a list of bands that use the item’s label is displayed in the Band Reference Label browser in the bottom part of the dialog box. In Figure 12–3, the File item, which is itself a submenu used to group other items, is used in a number of different bands, including the StandardMenuBar, NavMenuBar, etc. Its label is also used in a number of other bands, including many variants of the File band.
If you select the Bands folder tab at the top of the Search Nodes dialog box, you can then expand the Bands tree and select a particular band. The browser at the top right shows all the toolbar objects that use that band.
For example, Figure 12–4 shows that the Help band is used in a number of different toolbars.
If a band has been merged into a window’s toolbar using the band/object association, then those window objects are displayed in the browser at the lower right.
The split bar is a selectable object between the TreeView control and the display panel on the right. By positioning the cursor over the split bar and dragging it to the right or left, you can change the relative size of the TreeView panel and the right-hand display panel, in order to see all the sublevels of nodes in the TreeView. You can also resize the entire window as necessary to avoid having scroll bars in the tab folders on the right.