Menu/ToolBar Implementation Chat - 4/13/2005 @ 9pm EST

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Posted 19 years ago by Actipro Software Support - Cleveland, OH, USA
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We're interested in having an initial design roundtable chat with UIStudio users to help design which features should be implemented for future menu/toolbar enhancements to UIStudio.

We're targeting a roundtable chat for 4/13/2005 at 9pm EST, open to everyone who is interested. Just e-mail us with your MSN Messenger user ID.

Please bring feature ideas and be ready to tell us what you like and don't like about other third-party menu/toolbar controls that you've used.


Actipro Software Support

Comments (9)

Posted 19 years ago by Actipro Software Support - Cleveland, OH, USA
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If you aren't able to make the chat, we also encourage you to e-mail us with your ideas on what features you'd like to see with menus/toolbars. And also what you like and don't like about other third-party menu/toolbar controls you've used. Feel free to send us an e-mail any time with your comments!


Actipro Software Support

Posted 19 years ago by Jake Pearson - Software Developer, Alion Science and Technology
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Hi,
We currently use C1Command for our menus. The feature that I like the most that they have is called CommandStateQuery. It is a way to have the command poll to find out whether it should be enabled/disabled/visible. The implementation C1 uses does not use very much CPU and saves me a lot of coding to keep various buttons enabled.

thanks,
Jake
Posted 19 years ago by Actipro Software Support - Cleveland, OH, USA
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Thanks for the info Jake. Our plan is to have base Commands that would have Enabled/Visible settings. However Commands would not be UI objects. Each "instance" of a button would be a CommandLink object and those would be the actual UI objects. Each CommandLink would point to a Command. So the Command could automatically update any CommandLink that was based off it if you changed the Enabled/Visible states. Does that sound like it would work for you or do you have any suggestions?


Actipro Software Support

Posted 19 years ago by Jake Pearson - Software Developer, Alion Science and Technology
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That is great. Having a commandlink point at a command is very useful, we use it a lot to have a toolbar and menu and outlook bar item all point at the same command.

What I am talking about is having an event that you fire periodically to allow me to change command state. For example, if there is a save command. I only want it to be enabled when the document hasn't changed. One way to do that is to change the commands state as the document changes. In C1, you can have the command ask what it's state should be. It is sort of a polling solution, but it allows me to separate the menu/command structure from the rest of my appliation.

-Jake
Posted 19 years ago by Actipro Software Support - Cleveland, OH, USA
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When does it fire?


Actipro Software Support

Posted 19 years ago by Jake Pearson - Software Developer, Alion Science and Technology
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It fires whenever it needs to. I have never really looked at the when, but for context and regular menus it would probably be right before they display. For toolbars or other buttons that show all the time, maybe they fire on the Application.Idle event or a timer that happens every 100ms or so.
Posted 19 years ago by Boyd - Sr. Software Developer, Patterson Consulting, LLC
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This method is similar to how Codejock Software does there menu/toolbar items. There is an "update" event that is fired to determine if a control needs to be enabled, visible, checked, etc (you can basically change any property).

This event is fired once for each command just before a drop-down/popup menu is displayed. For toolbars where items are always visible, it is fired periodically for each visible control on the toolbar (i.e. every 100ms).

This technique has proven to be very useful in maintaining the state of my menu/toolbar commands in a single location. As long as there is no processor intensive code within my handling of the update event, I don't see any performance problems.
Posted 19 years ago by liggett78
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As I can imagine, this functionality would be available in UIStudio 2.0, right? Any plans, when it will be released (like September etc.)? Thanks, Joerg
Posted 19 years ago by Actipro Software Support - Cleveland, OH, USA
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That is the goal at this point to have base menu/toolbars for UIStudio 2.0. Not sure on a release date. We have been working on it jointly while working on enhancements for SyntaxEditor as well. We've made some decent progress so far though.


Actipro Software Support

The latest build of this product (v24.1.0) was released 1 month ago, which was after the last post in this thread.

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