revEnterprise dp-5 / revMedia beta / revWeb beta

[Richard Gaskin]

Richard Miller wrote:
> Sorry, Richard.... it was regarding the latter (popup/pulldowns). What's 
> the disadvantage of using a pulldown menu with tabs to create 
> submenu's... as opposed to a cascade menu button?

None at all; in the modern engine they're completely different animals.

In the olden days, before menus could be drawn from the text of buttons, 
one had to create stacks with buttons on them as menus.  Yes, it was as 
onerous and ugly as it sounds. ;)

To make submenus in such a system, we used cascade style menu buttons in 
those menu stacks.

After menu buttons were modified to render OS-native menus from the 
button's textual contents, using stacks as menus is now pretty much 
useless for everything except drop-down galleries.

That would leave cascade style menus as mere detritus in the engine, 
were it not for the fairly common convention in recent years of having 
flyout menus, menus with a right-pointing triangle that work similarly 
to popups but the menu appears at a specific location, at the top-right 
of the control.

Using a cascade style menu for this would be wonderful, except for the 
two shortcomings I noted (non-native appearance and the need to hold the 
mouse button down).

The workaround now is to make a right-pointing arrow icon, assign it to 
a button, make a hidden popup style button which has your menu items and 
menupick handlers, and use the popup command to show that menu from the 
visible control with the icon.

Ugh.

Not impossible, not really all that difficult, but requiring two 
controls to get something we're so close to having perfectly with a 
single control feels unclean. ;)

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
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