XPToolkit Menu Requirements

Written by Chris Saari
Last Modified: 2/23/99

Overview

This document covers the menu bar, menu lists, and menu items. This does not cover context menus, although they should be very similar. This does not cover popup menus, those are a seperate widget. This does not cover keyboard equivalents or accelerators for menus, pending more work in that area. This lightly touches menu/command merging, but that is very preliminary.

A menu item is a line item in a visible UI menu. It has text (displayed visually) and may contain a shortcut key (cmd-Q for example). A menu item can be enabled or disabled separately from the other items around it. A special kind of menu item, called a separator, is visually represented as a disabled horizontal line with no text.

A menu list corresponds to an entire UI menu, and is a sequential ordered list of menu items. A menu list may be hierarchical and have sub-menu lists hanging off of items.

A menu bar is an ordered collection of menu lists. Menu bars are used to present several menus, usually in a non-transient way. Context menus, for example, would not use a menu bar since they are only displaying a single transient menu.

Requirements

• Internationalization support. Dependent upon each OS's support?
• Keyboard navigation, both keyboard accelerators and equivalents

Menu Bars

• create a menu bar
• destroy a menu bar
• draw a menu bar
• get menu bar of a window
• set menu bar of a window
• set default menu bar for app (Mac apps can have menu bars with no windows)
• highlight a menu bar item (needed?)

Menu List

• create a menu list (menu)
• destroy a menu list (menu)
• add a menu list (menu) to menu bar
• insert a menu list (menu) in a menu bar
• remove a menu list (menu) from a menu bar
• set a menu list's (menu's) icon
• get a menu list's (menu's) icon
• enable/disable a menu list

Menu Items

• create a menu item
• destroy a menu item
• add a menu item to a menu list (menu)
• remove a menu item from a menu list (menu)
• add a separator to a menu list (menu)
• get a menu item's text
• set a menu item's text
• check/uncheck a menu item
• enable/disable a menu item
• query if menu item is checked
• query if menu item is enabled
• query if menu item has a submenu
• assign a submenu to an menu item
• remove a submenu from a menu item
• set a menu item's Command Node (abstract command node) [is this still relevant?]
• get a menu item's Command Node (abstract command node) [is this still relevant?]

Menu Item Arbitration / Merging

We are unclear at this time if Menu Merging is a requirement.