Sprocket Menus 3

Volume Number: 11

Issue Number: 7

Column Tag: Getting Started

Sprocket Menus, Part 3

By Dave Mark, MacTech Magazine Regular Contributing Author

Note: Source code files accompanying article are located on MacTech CD-ROM or

source code disks.

Last month, we added a new class to our Drag Manager friendly picture window

program. In addition to the Drag Manager friendly text window, we also added a pair of

menus to the program. The Text menu appeared when the frontmost window was a text

window, and the Picture window appeared when the frontmost window was a picture

window.

We learned about static data members and member functions, and added the data

member fgMenu to both the TTextWindow and TPictureWindow classes. fgMenu

contains the MenuHandle for either the Text or Picture window. We also added a

static member function named SetUpStaticMenu() to both classes.

SetUpStaticMenu() registers the commands associated with its classes’ menu (go

back a few columns if you don’t know about menu commands and CMNU resources).

Since fgMenu is static, it is global to the class, and not to a specific object. That means

we don’t need to create a new Text menu for each TTextWindow object we create. By

having a single menu per class, we can register the menu commands at initialization,

then leave the commands registered as we delete the menu from the menu bar and

reinsert it, depending on the type of the frontmost window.

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