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 bar structure¶

The following 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 has 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.

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

Assign popup menus to components¶

If you use Java 5 or later, you can assign the 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 click on the Show Advanced Properties in the toolbar of the Properties view to see the property.

Note that JFormDesigner must run on Java 5 to use the "componentPopupMenu" property. Open the JFormDesigner About dialog and check whether it displays "Java 1.5.x".