Menus

From jVantage

One of the powerful features jVantage provides is that it generates hyperlinks and context sensitive menus automatically based on the relationships of entities in your applications. Two types of menus are generated; the Relationship Menu and the Definitions Menu.

By default, the relationship menu is shown on the left-hand side of the user interface, and is rendered in vertical format. This menu can be displayed anywhere on the user interface by simply updating user interface templates. Furthermore, the orientation of the menu can be changed to specify a horizontal or vertical format using the new properties.

The relationship menu is so named because it contains options that reflect entity relationships. For instance, if your application contains an entity called employer which has a one to many relationship with another entity called employee, jVantage will automatically add menu options to allow employees to be viewed from the context of the employer. These options can, of course, be limited and removed through the use of triggers or by modifying access control list. By default, however, all entity relationships are reflected in the relationship menu. It is also possible to add additional menu options to the relationship menu using triggers or custom programming code. Since the jVantage development environment is also a jVantage application, you can easily see examples of how this works from the development environment itself.

The definitions menu is generally displayed at the bottom of the user interface. It provides options that pertain to the entity in the current view. The definitions menu provides functions that are also known by the acronym CRUD, for create, read, update and delete. This menu is so named because it provides the ability for users to define entities relevant in the current view. Again, like the relationship menu, the orientation of this menu can be changed from horizontal to vertical, or placed elsewhere on the screen through the use of templates and by modifying menu properties using the property application.

Advanced users can replace the default menus altogether by creating a custom Enterprise Java Bean that renders a custom menu. Fields are available at the application level to allow control of the menu rendering routines as shown in this screenshot.