Design GUI elements

Designing GUI elements includes a number of activities. Besides designing forms (windows) and controls, one has to design menus and tool bars (actions) and the project. Finally, application rules might become necessary in order to get the application running. Since all these activities are closely related, they are discussed in this topic (and related sub topics).

Main activities for designing a GUI application are:

• Defining project, application and window actions
• Creating GUI classes from project data types

• Defining data model based forms containing data model based controls
• Defining textual information (labels, tool tips, usage hints)

• Creating transient application classes

• Defining application class based forms and controls
• Defining textual information (labels, tool tips, usage hints)

• Defining menus and tool bars (actions) for forms and controls
• Associating and implementing context classes to GUI resources

• Overload event handlers
• Implement control specific actions

In order to support GUI application design, the Designer provides several types of assistance.

• Initialize GUI classes from one or more design patterns
• create control defaults when adding a field to a form
• Create online help from usage hints and data source content definition

In the simple case, one may create a complete application mainly by drag, drop and click and gets a running application that allows browsing, updating, creating and deleting data in the database. In most cases, this will, however, not be sufficient and one has to update definitions or to create new GUI resources manually. The Designer provides property forms for any type of GUI resource. The most important forms for window (form) and control definitions are accessible from the GUI class tree. Action definitions can be created or updated from the action tree. Other resources can be processed via tool bar buttons or via the Objects main menu item.

Details for each resource type are described in Design References.