About Creating Menu Forms

You create a menu form in one of three ways:

• nUse the Designer to interactively design your menu form, and save its binary representation in a library.
  
  
• nUse the Vermont Views library of functions and write the code that creates a menu form at run-time.
  
  
• nUse the Designer to interactively design your menu form and the Source Code Generator to generate its source code equivalent. Compile and link the module with your application.

For most applications, the recommended method is to use the Designer to create your menu forms. The Designer is fast, flexible, and easy to use. You can implement any Vermont Views feature using the Designer. When you save a Designer form, all the information you have specified for that form (size, color, field types, and so on) is saved in binary representation in a library. During application execution, information about the form is read from the library using a single function call. Information about creating forms using the Designer is presented in detail in the Designer User's Guide. Information about using Designer menu forms in your application is introduced in this manual in Chapter 18, "Using Designer Menu Forms." Useful information is contained throughout this manual, the User's Guide.

The alternative method, writing menus in code, may be useful for some applications. If your application uses only a few simple menus, it may be more efficient to create those menus in code. Information about creating menus in code is presented in Chapter 19, "Writing Menus in Code."

The Designer contains a utility program called the Source Code Generator. If you use the Designer to create your menus, you can use the Source Code Generator to generate the source code equivalent for your menu. You can then use the generated source code as a compilable module. Using the Source Code Generator is not desirable for many applications, but it is a useful tool in cases when you want to create a menu using the Designer but do not want to use a Designer library menu at run-time. The Designer User's Guide contains a complete discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of using generated source code, as well information about how to use the Source Code Generator.

Note: The Source Code Generator is distinct from the Main Generator. The Source Code Generator generates the source code equivalent for creating a menu at run-time. The Main Generator generates a prototype main() module for your application.