Form Menu

The Form Menu contains commands that affect the appearance of the current form. The commands on the menu are:

• Show Widget Palette -- Displays the Widget Palette, which is a small window containing buttons for the various kinds of widgets that you can add to a form window to design a dialog interactively. To add a widget to a form, first click the button for the desired type of widget in the palette, and then click on a form to add an instance of that type of widget to the form. Alternately, use Form | Add Component.

  You can also display the palette by clicking in the background area of a form window, unless the show-widget-palette-when-click-form option has been turned off.

  If the widget palette overlaps the selected form window when the palette is displayed, it will automatically be shifted off of the form window so that it doesn't get buried by the form.

• Add Component -- Displays, in an Add Component dialog, a list of components and adds the selected one to the current form.

• Add Menu Bar -- This command is on the menu when the selected form does not have a menu bar.

  This command adds the default menu bar to the form and displays the Menu Editor dialog. If you cancel the Menu Editor, the menu bar is not installed on the form.

  If the form already has a menu bar, this command will not appear on the Form menu. Instead, the command Edit Menu Bar appears. See also the Remove Menu Bar menu command.

• Edit Menu Bar -- This item is only present when the current form has a menu bar. If the current form does not have a menu bar, the Add Menu Bar command will be on the Form menu instead. This command displays the Menu Editor dialog for the menu bar on the form.

  See also the Remove Menu Bar command.

• Remove Menu Bar -- Removes the menu bar from the current form, if there is one. See also the Add Menu Bar command and the Edit Menu Bar command.

• Set Tab Order -- Displays a Tab Order dialog allowing you to specify the tab order of controls on the current form. When the form is run, pressing tab will move focus among controls. The order in which focus moves among controls can be set by this dialog. See tab-position.

  (Note that keyboard shortcuts can be used to jump to a control with a keypress. The keyboard shortcut is defined by placing a tilde (~) before the keyboard shortcut letter. The keyboard shortcut is then Alt-[the letter]. The static-text control cannot have focus so if its value has a tilde before a letter, that provides a keyboard shortcut to the next control in the tab order. See the discussion Using a static text as a keyboard shortcut to jump to a control in the static-text entry.)

• Space Equally -- Arrange the selected components so they are equally spaced.

• Show Alignment -- Show alignment cues for aligned controls.

Copyright (c) 1998-2012, Franz Inc. Oakland, CA., USA. All rights reserved.
Documentation for Allegro CL version 8.2. The object described on this page has been modified in the 8.2 release; see the Release Notes.
Created 2010.1.21.