Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual

A simple MenuBar

If you are specifying an item in the MenuBar, the first parameter is a symbolic constant that identifies the type of the

item. Since CascadeButtons are the only elements that can display PulldownMenus, the first parameter should always

be set to XmVaCASCADEBUTTON. The label of the CascadeButton is given by the second parameter, which must be a

compound string. In the above example, the variable file contains a compound string that contains the text File.

The third parameter specifies an optional mnemonic character for the CascadeButton that can be used to post the

menu from the keyboard. The mnemonic for the File menu is F. By convention, the first letter of a menu or menu item

label is used as the mnemonic.

We use the compound string creation function, XmStringCreateLocalized(), to create the compound strings

for the menu labels. This function creates a compound string with the text encoded in the current locale.

XmStringCreateLocalized() is a new routine in Motif 1.2; it replaces XmStringCreateSimple(),

which creates a compound string using the default character set associated with the widget in which the string is

rendered. For a complete discussion of compound strings, see Chapter 19, Compound Strings.

Since you are not creating each CascadeButton using the normal creation routines, you are not returned a handle to

each button. You might think that the label string that you assign to each button is used as the widget's name, but this

is not the case. The buttons are created ...