Menu styles

A menu can have a contemporary or traditional style.

Menu style	Description
Contemporary	A 3D-style menu similar to Microsoft Office 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 menus
Traditional	Window default menu style which has a flat appearance

Menus that you import or migrate from earlier versions of PowerBuilder have the traditional style, and new menus use the traditional menu style by default. The new contemporary menu style has a three-dimensional menu appearance that can include images and menu title bands. With a contemporary menu, you can set the MenuAnimation, MenuImage, and MenuTitleText at runtime using scripts.

You select a menu style on the Appearance tab of the Properties view for the top-level menu object in the Menu painter. You must select the top-level menu object in the Tree Menu view of the Menu painter to display its Properties view.

To specify the menu style:

Select the top-level menu object.
In the Appearance tab page, select the menu style you want, contemporarymenu! or traditionalmenu!

The sample shows the Menu painter layout. The title bar displays the text m _ employees _ frame ( employees) inhertied from menu - Menu. The Tree Menu view at top left shows an expanded view of m _ employees _ frame with all its menu options. To its right is the WYSIWYG view of m _ m _ employees _ frame with the options New, Open, Close, which is grayed, Print, Print Setup, Tool bars, and Exit. The General tab of the Properties view displays the menu’s general properties at far right and the Script view at bottom left displays.

If you select contemporarymenu! in the Menu Style drop-down list, you can customize the display properties for that style and have them apply to all menu items in the current menu. If you select traditionalmenu! the rest of the menu style properties are grayed.

Images for menus and toolbars

Contemporary menus can include images. You can use icons, bitmaps, GIF files, and JPEG files for both contemporary menus and traditional and contemporary toolbars.

All stock icons have a transparent background. Other icon and GIF files with transparent backgrounds are always displayed with a transparent background. If you want a bitmap to display with a transparent background, the bitmap must use button face as its background color. This applies whatever the background color of the menu or toolbar is set to. There is currently no property that allows you to specify that an image has a transparent background.

When an icon file includes several images

With the contemporary menu style and toolbar style, when an icon file includes several images, PowerBuilder uses the following image selection rules:

If the images . . .	PowerBuilder displays . . .
Are all the same size	8 bit, 16 bit, 24 bit, 32 bit, and 4 bit images in that order.
Include 16 bit*16 bit images and also other sized images	16 bit*16 bit images.
Do not include 16 bit*16 bit images	The image with the image size closest to 16 bit. For example, if one icon file contains 2424 bit images and another icon file contains 3232 bit images, then PowerBuilder selects the 24*24 bit images.
Are greater than 16 bit images	The image as 1616 bit or 3232 bit. If the icon image is 1616, then it displays as 1616. If the icon image is larger than 1616, it will be displayed as 3232.