Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress Dynamics Basic Development

Band object associations

You can associate an object with one or more menu structures. When the container of a window is initialized, it searches for all associated menus for all objects contained within the window. It then inserts or merges each menu structure into the menu or toolbar. You can also specify where to merge the menu bands by specifying a placeholder item within the menu hierarchy.

Figure 12–14 shows the Band Object tab using the Dynamics Session Options band as an example. As you can see, the Dynamics Session Options band is associated with a large number of different container objects, as shown in the Object Filename browser field.

Figure 12–14: Toolbar and Menu Designer—Band Object tab

To add an object association:

Choose the desired band node.
Select the Band Object tab.
Choose the Add button in the Update panel.

To illustrate, consider the File band that contains the items shown in Figure 12–15.

Figure 12–15: File band

Assume that a Navigation band is to be merged into the File band at the Placeholder 1 position. Figure 12–16 shows the results.

Figure 12–16: Merging bands results

Figure 12–17 shows an example to make it a bit clearer how bands are defined and merged.

Figure 12–17: Toolbar and Menu Designer—Band Item tab

Figure 12–17 shows expanded parts of the MenuController toolbar. This is the standard toolbar that appears in the type of dynamic window called a Menu Controller, which you have already seen in the Administration window, and perhaps also as the main window of the sample application in OpenEdge Development: Progress Dynamics Getting Started . As you can see, the MenuController toolbar contains four bands: a MenuController band, a MenuFunction band, a Windows band, and an IconExit band.

The MenuController band in turn contains four subbands: File, DynamicMenu, Window, and Help.

Any bands that you merge into a container with the MenuController toolbar appear in the location identified by the DynamicMenu placeholder band. Since this band appears after the File menu and before the Window and Help menus, the merged band or bands also appear in that sequence.

Figure 12–17 shows that the Dynamics Session Options band is associated with, or merged into, a number of different container objects. The Administration window, named afallmencw, is one of these. In that window, it has a Band Sequence of 6, meaning that it is the sixth subband to be inserted into that one placeholder following the File menu. (In fact, because some of the sequence values are not used, it is the fourth subband merged in. In other words, sequence values do not need to be contiguous, only in the proper relative order.) The Administration window in Figure 12–18 shows the effects of this.

Figure 12–18: Progress Dynamics Administration window example

The Application, Deployment, Security, Session, System, Transaction, and Links subbands have all been merged into the placeholder for the MenuController band, appearing between the File band and the Window band.

If you drop down the File menu, you will see all the items that belong to the FileMenu band, as shown in the TreeView structure. This included Re-Logon, Suspend, etc.

The Window band contains a single item that lets the user alternate between having multiple windows for different data items and having them displayed in a single window. For example, if one Customer is selected in a Customer Object Controller or browse window, it brings up the Customer Maintenance folder. Then, if another Customer is selected, this toggle box determines whether a second instance of the Customer Maintenance window comes up for the second selected Customer.

Note: If you follow this thread by walking through this set of related elements in the Toolbar Designer, you can find out a little about how this works. Selecting the Window band (not to be confused with the Windows band), you will see that it contains an item called multiwindow. If you then locate this item under the <None> category, you will see that the property that is alternated on and off here is called MultiInstanceActivated. This property is examined by the framework code at run time to determine the correct behavior.

The Help band contains the usual Help options.

The MenuController band has two more subbands in it: a Windows band (different from the Window band), and an IconExit band. They are both defined as Menu&toolbar bands. The toolbar buttons that appear at the left side of the Menu Controller window are the toolbar visualization of the items in the Windows band. These items provide access to MS Windows applications such as Excel and Word. In the MenuController hierarchy, the same Windows band is also a subband of the File menu. These same functions will appear as menu items in a submenu under the File menu. The IconExit band defines the Exit button that appears on the right side of the Menu Controller window.

So this is how you can use bands to form parts of a larger whole, represented by the toolbar object itself, which you will examine in more detail in the next section.

Before you do that, however, you have some bands of your own to define as part of the example exercise.