Modifying an existing style
The easiest way to get started building form styles is to
copy an existing form style and work with it. By examining its structure
and making small changes, you can quickly understand how form styles
work.
To begin by modifying an existing form style:
-
Open the Library painter in PowerBuilder.
-
Copy the window and menu that serve as the foundation
for a form style to a library that is on your application’s
library search path.
Starting from a built-in form style The windows and menus that serve as the basis for the built-in
form styles are in IMSTYLE120.PBL, which is
shipped with InfoMaker and installed in the InfoMaker 12.0 directory.
You can make a copy of this PBL and use it as the basis of your
own form styles. -
Open the window in the Window painter and select
File>Save As from the menu bar to save it with a new name. -
Give the window a new name.
You can use any name you want, except that names of windows
that define form styles must be unique across all style libraries
that are used by an InfoMaker user. -
Define a special comment for the window (for instructions,
see “Identifying the window as
the basis of a style”). -
Click OK to save the window.
-
Open the menu in the Menu painter and select File>Save
As from the menu bar to save it with a new name. -
Provide a new name and an optional comment, then
click OK to save the menu.You do not need to provide a comment for the menu, but it
is a good idea to identify it as being used in the form style you
are building. -
Enhance the form style (for instructions, see “Completing the style “).
Identifying the window as the basis of a style
In order for InfoMaker to recognize that a window in a library
serves as the basis for a form style, you must specify a comment
for the window that starts with the text Style:
|
1 |
Style: <i>text that describes the style</i> |
The text that follows Style: is the text
that displays below the icon for the form style in the New Form
dialog box in InfoMaker.
For example, if you save a w_pbstyle_freeform window
with the comment Style: Maintain corporate data in
a style library, InfoMaker users see this when they create a new
form:
You can specify the comment either when first saving the window
or in the Library painter.
For more information about designing windows,
see the PowerBuilder Users Guide
.