When you begin to program with Active Documents, you are concerned with two
applications that must share menu space on the same Window.
The solution to this issue is the NegotiatePosition property
of the menu items. NegotiatePosition indicates the relative placement (left,
middle, center, or none) of a menu item inside another application's menu system.
As illustrated in Figure 14.3, you will choose a NegotiatePosition
property from the drop-down list in the Menu Editor for each toplevel menu item.
Here are the special considerations for each of the choices for
NegotiatePosition:
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None. The item won't show up with the container's menu.
-
Left. The container will typically never place your menu item on
the extreme left side of the menu bar. This is because the left-most item is typically
reserved for the container's File menu, which by convention always goes on
the left. Instead the container will usually attempt to situate your menu item as close
to the left as possible.
-
Middle. If you have a number of top-level menu items, all but
two of them should have their NegotiatePosition property set to Middle (that is you can
have at most one Left item and one Right item). The container will then use its own
logic to determine where to place all the items you've designated with a Middle
NegotiatePosition.
-
Right. If the container has a Help menu, the menu you specify with
a NegotiatePosition of Right will show up under the container's
Help menu (see the following section for more details). Otherwise, this menu will
usually show up on the right of the container's menus.
FIGURE 14.3 The NegotiatePosition property in the Menu Editor.
You should note that the container application will make its own decision about
how to interpret your NegotiatePosition property. You
should think of this setting as a preference you are indicating to the container
rather than an order that the container will definitely carry out.
