Eclipse Cookbook

9.7. Creating a Menu System

Problem

You want to create and add a menu system to your SWT application.

Solution

Create a menu system with Menu and MenuItem objects. You create a new Menu object for the menu system itself, and new MenuItem objects for the individual menus and menu items.

Discussion

You use Menu and MenuItem objects to create menu systems in SWT; to get a handle on this process, we’re going to create a menu system here, with File and Edit menus. When the user selects a menu item we’ll display the item he has selected in a text widget.

This example is MenuApp at this book’s site. You start by creating a standard menu system with a Menu object corresponding to the menu bar. Here is a selection of popular Menu methods:

void addMenuListener(MenuListener listener)

Adds the listener to the collection of listeners who will be notified when menus are hidden or shown

MenuItem getItem(int index)

Returns the item at the given index

int getItemCount( )

Returns the number of items contained in the menu

void setVisible(boolean visible)

Makes the menu visible if the argument is true, invisible otherwise

Here’s our menu bar, created with the SWT.BAR style:

public class MenuClass
{

    Display display;
    Shell shell;
    Menu menuBar;
    Text text;

    public MenuClass( )
    {
        display = new Display( );
        shell = new Shell(display);
        shell.setText("Menu Example");
        shell.setSize(300, 200);

        text = new Text(shell, SWT.BORDER);
        text.setBounds(80, 50, 150, 25);

        menuBar = new Menu(shell, SWT.BAR);
         .
         .
         .

After creating ...