Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide

Menu Resources

Menus are created and stored as resources in your application. Depending on the development environment you use, you make the menus in different ways. First, we show you how to create menus with PilRC (the GNU PalmPilot SDK resource creator) and then using CodeWarrior’s Constructor. In either case, the menus end up in a .PRC resource file.

The .PRC file

The .PRC file contains an MBAR resource for each menubar in your application. These MBAR resources are in turn composed of a number of menus, each of which contains menu items. Each menu item has associated with it a menu ID and, optionally, a shortcut key. When you design your menubars, you need to make sure that no two menu items in menus displayed at the same time have the same key shortcut—each shortcut must be unique.

Using PilRC

To create your .PRC file using GCC, use the PilRC Resource Compiler. PilRC allows you to directly create menubar resources; later you will learn that this is a tremendous advantage. PilRC is a textual, rather than a graphical, resource editor.

Here’s a simple MBAR (ID 1000) Resource with two menus, each with two items (the item IDs are 1001, 1002, 1011, and 1012):

MENU 1000
BEGIN
    PULLDOWN "Menu1"
    BEGIN
        MENUITEM "Item1"   1001     "I"
        MENUITEM "Item2"   1002  
    END
    PULLDOWN "Menu2"
    BEGIN
        MENUITEM "Item3"   1011 
        MENUITEM "Item4"   1012 
    END
END

To define the shortcut keys of menu items in PilRC, simply supply the character surrounded by double quotes. In our simple example, the first menu item has a shortcut ...