Creating Branching Menus

There are three distinct phases to creating branching menus with Vermont Views:

• nDefining the top-level menu and sub-menus.
  
  
• nDefining menu fields for each item of each menu.
  
  
• nWriting the action functions called by menu items.

Menus and menu fields can be created in the Designer or in your code. Menus can be configured to be horizontal, vertical, or both, based on the size of the window.

Vermont Views provides three predefined action functions: (1) FORMCALL(), to call a data form, (2) MENUCALL(), to call a sub-menu, and (3) CHECKMARK(), to toggle the check mark in front of a menu field. You can also write your own action functions to do anything you desire.

You can choose the type of menu. Two types of menus are available, standard menus and autoselect menus. Top-level menus can only be standard menus. Sub-menus can be standard or autoselect. For standard menus, the user must explicitly select its parent menu field to see the attached sub-menu. For autoselect menus, the menu is automatically displayed when its parent menu field is highlighted. Also, for sub-menu forms, you have the option of allowing the Vermont Views system to automatically size and/or place the sub-menu window.