Teach Yourself Borland C++ in 14 Days - portal

Working with the Form Designer and the Menu Designer
Batch Modification of Properties
Sometimes you want to modify several menu items’ properties at one time. For example, we
have a few menu items in the ScratchPad application that we are not ready to implement at
this time. We aren’t ready for printing support, for instance, nor are we ready to implement
the help system. We need to gray out (disable) those menu items:
1. Choose Help | Contents in the Menu Designer.
2. Change the Enabled property to False. The menu item is grayed out.
3. Click on the File menu.
4. Click on the Print menu item, hold down the Shift key, and click on the Print
Setup menu item. Both items are selected.
5. In the Object Inspector, change the Enabled property to False. Both menu items
are disabled.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 to disable the Find and Replace items on the Edit menu.
You can modify a group of menu items at one time with this method. Simply select the items
you want to modify and then change the property you want to modify. All menu items
currently selected will have the new property value.
Creating Submenus
There’s nothing special or tricky about creating submenus. A submenu is a menu item that,
when clicked, expands to show more menu choices. A submenu is denoted by a rightpointing
arrow next to the menu item text. You can create a submenu by choosing Create
Submenu from the Menu Designer speed menu or by holding down the Ctrl key and pressing
the right-arrow key. When you create a submenu, a blank menu item is placed to the right
of the submenu. You can add menu items to the submenu just as you did when creating the
main menu. You can create a submenu by inserting a menu template as well.
Adding Shortcuts
You can easily add keyboard shortcuts to your menu items by changing the ShortCut property
of the menu item in the Object Inspector. The Edit menu that we inserted earlier already had
keyboard shortcuts built in. For instance, the customary shortcut for Cut is Ctrl+X. If you
look at the Edit menu, you will see Ctrl+X listed next to the Cut item. Click on the Cut menu
item, and you will see that the ShortCut property says Ctrl+X. Click on the Value column
next to the ShortCut property. On the right side of the Value column you will see a drop-down
button. Click on the button to display the list of available shortcuts. The list you see there
contains just about any keyboard shortcut you would need. To set the keyboard shortcut for
a menu item, simply pick one of the shortcuts from the list.
251
7