HowTo: Add a Window Menu

Add a custom Window Menu to your Real-time Application in TurtleBrains.

The following guide is a continuation of HowTo: Start a Real-time Application which provides a great way to start an application if you haven't already.

The following steps are the same basic steps taken to add a Status Bar, Menu, or Dialog Prompt to your application.

1. Create the necessary identifiers for the menu and menu items. (ex. MenuIdentifier / MenuItemIdentifier)
2. Create and customized the menu as desired, setting up everything as needed. (ex. ApplicationMenu / AddMenuItem)
3. Handle events in the ApplicationHandler when the user interacts with the menu. (ex. OnMenuAction).

This is fairly straight forward, so the following code snippets will speak for themselves. Adding a window menu is a reasonably high priority for most applications so we start there.

MyApplicationValues.h

enum MyMenus { kWindowMenu, kContextMenu, }
enum MyMenuItems { kMenuItemFile, kMenuItemFileCreate, kMenuItemFileExit, kMenuItemAbout, }

MyApplicationHandler.cpp (modify to add window menu)

void MyApplicationHandler::OnWindowOpen(void)
{
    //Create a menu and set it as the Window Menu.
    tbApplication::ApplicationMenu windowMenu(kWindowMenu);
    windowMenu.AddMenuItem(kMenuItemFile, tb_string("File"));
    windowMenu.AddMenuItem(kMenuItemFileCreate, tb_string("Create"), kMenuItemFile);
    windowMenu.AddMenuItem(kMenuItemFileExit, tb_string("Exit"), kMenuItemFile);
    windowMenu.AddMenuItem(kMenuItemAbout, tb_string("About"));
    theApplication.SetWindowMenu(windowMenu);
}

MyApplicationHandler.cpp (modify to add window menu)

void MyApplicationHandler::OnMenuAction(const MenuIdentifier& menu, const MenuItemIdentifier& menuItem)
{
    if (kWindowMenu == menu)
    {
        if (kMenuItemFileCreate == menuItem)
        {
        }
        else if (kMenuItemFileExit == menuItem)
        {
            theApplication.Close();
        }
        else if (kMenuItemAbout == menuItem)
        {
        }
    }
}