EUS Menu System

Overview

The Menu System can quickly design and create the menus needed to navigate through applications.

Menus created with the Menu Editor are called static menus and are stored in menu files. Menus created at run time are called dynamic menus and are created by CALLing the appropriate utilities to create and handle the menu records without reading menu files. A dynamic menu can be saved in a menu file, and, thus, become static.

Developers converting existing applications to use the EUS Toolkit can convert their menu data at run time to BASIS Menu files. The _msmktpl.utl utility can be used to create a dynamic menu record, which can then be written to a primary menu file for later use by _msdrv.utl.

The Menu System provides various options for shaping and controlling the behavior of menus, including shadow effects, overlays, cascading menus, submenu boxes, spreadsheet-style menus, character highlighting and hot-key abilities, etc. Menus can also be given titles, multiline items, and columnar formats.

The Menu System can deny access to menu choices through the (SECURITY) global string. Menus and security strings can be custom-tailored to match users and installations.

The reference section for _msedit.utl describes how to create and modify static menus. Dynamic menus are created with _msmktpl.utl. The Menu System driver, _msdrv.utl, displays static and dynamic menus and handles user input.