Windows applications provide groups of related commands in Menus. These commands
depends on the application, but some-such as Open and Save -are frequently found
in applications. Visual Basic provides an easy way to create menus with the modal
Menu Editor dialog. The below dialog is displayed when the Menu Editor is selected
in the Tool Menu. The Menu Editor command is grayed unless the form is visible.
And also you can display the Menu Editor window by right clicking on the Form
and selecting Menu Editor.
In the Menu Editor Window you can specify the structure of your menu by adding
one command at a time. Each menu command has two compulsory properties.
-
Caption : This is the name that user sees on the application's menu
bar
-
Name : This is the name of the menu command. This property
doesn't appear on the screen, but this name is used program the menu command.
An expanded Menu Editor window.
An expanded menu
The programmer can create menu control arrays. The Index TextBox specifies
the menu's index in the control array.
The Menu Editor dialog also provides several CheckBoxes to control the appearance
of the Menu.
Checked : This is unchecked by default and allows the
programmer the option of creating a checked menu item( a menu item that act as
a toggle and displays a check mark when selected. The following is a Check Menu
items.
Enabled : specifies whether a menu is disabled or not.
If you see a disabled command in a menu that means that feature is not available.
The Visible checkbox specifies whether the menu is visible or not.
To add commands to the Form's menu bar, enter a caption and a
name for each command. As soon as you start typing the command's caption, it also
appears in a new line in the list at the bottom of the Menu Editor window. To
add more commands click Enter and type the Caption and the Name.
Creating Menus
Open a new Project and save the form as menu.frm and save the
project as menu.vbp.
Choose Tools ››› Menu Editor and type the
menu items as shown below.
| Caption |
Name |
| File |
mnuFile |
| Open |
mnuOpen |
| Save |
mnuSave |
| Exit |
mnuExit |
| Edit |
mnuEdit |
| Copy |
mnuCopy |
| Cut |
mnuCut |
| Paste |
mnuPaste |
Run the application by pressing F5. You can see that you can select
a menu. (Download the source code)
Creating Pop-Up Menus
Nearly every windows application provides a context menu (or short cut menu)
that the user can invoke by right clicking the Form or a control. This Pop-Up
menu is a regular menu, but it is not anchored on the Form. It can be displayed
anywhere on the Form. Pop-Up menus are invoked with the PopupMenu method. First,
you create a menu as usual. Suppose you have designed the basic File and Edit
menus for an application, and they are displayed on the Form as usual. To make
the application a bit easier to use, you can also display the Edit menu as Pop-Up
menu. If the Edit menu's name is mnuEdit, you can insert the following line in
a control's MouseUp event:
Private Sub Form_MouseUp(Button As Integer, Shift As Integer, X As Single,
Y As Single)
If Button = vbRightButton Then
PopupMenu mnuEdit
End If
End Sub
(The MouseUp event is used because, unlike the click event, it illustrates
which button was pressed.)
If the right mouse button is pressed, the code calls the Form's PopupMenu method
to display the Edit menu. The PopupMenu method is usually called from within TextBox
and PictureBox controls, because these controls can carry out editing operations.
If you don't want the Edit menu to be displayed in the menu bar, still you
must have the Edit menu there and what you have to do is making the Edit menu
invisible.
