Menu woes

[SimPLsol at aol.com]

Richard Gaskin wrote:
What do you propose?

Good question!
1. Keep the good stuff.
     Although it causes half of the menu problems, I think it is important to 
continue having a cross-platform solution. Building menus with buttons may 
not be the best way to accomplish this. What we have now has carried us a long 
way but menus via externals would solve some of the problems and offer more 
flexibility.
2. I'd like to see the menus be separate from the stack.
     If the menus are separate, one can update them easily. This is important 
if you (or your customers) have stacks with a lot of data and you want to add 
or change menus and/or menuItems. This is really simple if you can store the 
menu code in a plugin.
3. I'd like the ability to have basic and expanded menus. 
     Most stacks in my business system have the same core menus. Individual 
stacks have different print commands and different items in the "Special" menu. 
It would be helpful to build the core menus once and then just add to them 
(probably in an openStack handler) as needed. This would also allow editing one 
core menu which would apply to all stacks where the core menu is used.
4. I don't believe putting menus in substacks is a good overall solution. 
There have been too many postings on this list regarding problems created by 
substacks.

I realize this is more theory than technique but I hope it helps a bit. More 
later.
Paul Looney