Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress Dynamics Basic Development

Defining categories

Categories are used simply to group items in any meaningful way. To define items, first expand the Item Categories node in the TreeView. A list of all existing categories appears. The categories Commit, Navigation, SubMenu, and TableIO are already defined as part of the framework. A great many items also have no specific category, and these are displayed under the (None) category heading. You are free to use this category, but usually you should organize your items into meaningful categories just to keep track of them more easily. In addition, if you want a group of items to have a specific SmartLink associated with them by default, you must define this at the level of the Category explained below.

Figure 12–5 shows a list of Categories. If you expand a Category, you see all the Items under that Category.

Note: This screen capture shows a few more categories than you will see when you open your Toolbar Designer, because of various sample objects, some of which you will be defining yourself.

Figure 12–5: Toolbar and Menu Designer—Category tab folder

Adding a new category

To add a Category, do one of the following:

Right-click on the Item Categories node and select Add Category, as shown:



Select any existing Category, then choose the Add button in the Update panel of the Category tab folder on the right.

If an item publishes an event when selected, you should specify the link name used to categorize this event when you define the item in the Item Link Default field. If no item-link is specified, the event is published from the container.

A toolbar can be a source or target for any number of different SmartLinks (or just links for short), which are used to communicate events and messages between the different objects in an application. For example, a Navigation band in a toolbar publishes the fetchFirst event when the user chooses the First button or selects the equivalent menu item. Another object, such as an SDO, is subscribed to this event in the toolbar automatically when there is a Navigation link between the two objects. When the event occurs, the procedure named fetchFirst in the subscriber is executed, and the subscriber can in this way respond to the event. The publisher of the event is called the source, and the subscriber is the target.

The First item publishes the fetchFirst event. Likewise, the Next, Prev, and Last items publish fetchNext, fetchPrev, and fetchLast, respectively. Collectively, these are referred to as Navigation events. The Navigation link defines the association between objects for all of them.

In a case where the events are grouped in this way, you can organize the corresponding items into a category where the link name is defined. This will then become the default link name for all items in the category. Specify the name of the link and whether it is the source or the target. Any toolbar containing items of this category will then be a candidate to establish the proper link. If there is no default link for the category, leave this field blank.