Chapter 4 Managing Profiles

Defining Menus in a Profile

You can add menus in the PowerDesigner interface and fill them with commands that call method functions or transformations.

Menus can be defined on stereotypes and criteria if you want to restrict their use to the metaclass instances with correct stereotype or verifying criterion.

You can add menus on any metaclass. Menus defined in a parent metaclass are inherited by children metaclasses.

Menu types

You can create contextual menus that will be called from an object in the Browser or a symbol in the diagram. These menus can be defined on any metaclass. You can generalize a contextual menu by defining it on a parent metaclass like BaseObject.

You can also add submenu in existing main menus. These submenus must be defined on a model or a diagram metaclass. Actually model or diagram metaclasses support both contextual and submenus.

Menu content

A menu can contain commands, submenus, and separators:

A menu command calls a method or a transformation defined in the same metaclass or in a parent metaclass of the menu
A submenu is a cascading menu that is displayed under a menu item
A separator is a line used to organize commands in a menu

Menus defined in a parent metaclass are inherited by children metaclasses.