Documentation

Menu Designer

The menu designer makes it easy to create and modify menu bars and popup menus. It supports in-place-editing menu texts and drag-and-drop menu items.

Menu structure

This figure shows the structure of a menu bar. The horizontal bar on top of the image is a JMenuBar that contains JMenu components. The JMenu contains JMenuItem, JCheckBoxMenuItem, JRadioButtonMenuItem or Menu Separator components. To create a sub-menu, put a JMenu into a JMenu.

The component palette provides a category "Menus" that contains all components necessary to create menus.

Creating menu bars

To create a menu bar:

  1. add a JMenuBar to a JFrame
  2. add JMenus to the JMenuBar and
  3. add JMenuItems to the JMenus

Select the necessary components in the Palette and drop them to the Design view.

Menu bar

You can freely drag and drop the various menu components to rearrange them.

Creating popup menus

To create a popup menu:

  1. add a JPopupMenu to the free area in the Design view and
  2. add JMenuItems to the JPopupMenu

Popup Menu

Assign popup menus to components

You can assign a popup menu to a component in the properties view using the "componentPopupMenu" property. Select the component to which you want attach the popup menu and assign it in the Properties view. Note that you must expand the Expert Properties category to see the property. Or use search as in the screenshot below.

Attach popup menu