Context menus

When you right click on most buttons, you will see a popup menu with relevant commands. For example, if you click on Symbol Catalog Settings $image\SYMICOND.gif$ , you see a list of the available catalogs. You can change these context menus or add new ones. Context menus can also be used on left button clicks, hotspots or even menu entries.

A right button click between commands also offers a popup menu, which you can edit or disable. How?

You’ll need to read Customizing Toolbars and Customising menus before approaching the next section.

Accessing context menus

CC3 has a special command CMENU, which opens a context menu. You can use it just as you can any other command. CC3’s default context menus are found in the System folder. They are plain text files with the suffix MNC. They follow all the rules for menu entries, except that sidebar menus are not permitted.

To make a context menu appear when you right click toolbar buttons:

When you edit a menu file, you’ll see entries like this:

#309,CC3ROTATE:[Rotate]{|CMENU SYSTEM\rotate.mnc;}|ROT;

When you right click on the Rotate button, you see the rotate menu described in rotate.mcn. To change the appearance of the menu, edit this file. Currently it looks like this:

&Rotate :|ROT;

&Non-visual Rotate:|ROTATE;

Rotate &Align:|ROTALN;

Rotated &Copies:|ROTCPY;

--------:

&Cursor Options...:|DYNOPT;

Change the entries just as you would for any menu, then save the file. You can also create new context menus, and add them to buttons. In the above example, you could make a new mnc file called myrotate.mnc and change the line in the fcw32.mnu file to read:

#309,CC3ROTATE:[Rotate]{|CMENU SYSTEM\myrotate.mnc;}|ROT;

To make context menu appear when you left click on a toolbar button

This isn’t standard CC3 interface practice, but you can add a context menu to a left click on a toolbar button. For example:

#309,CC3ROTATE:[Rotate context menu]{|ROT;}|CMENU SYSTEM\rotate.mnc;

To add a context menu to a hotspot

You can make a context menu appear when you click an area of a map. For example you could have entries which hide or show certain layers, or open a parent map. Click Tools > Macros > Hotspots and click the corners of the hotspot. Add a line such as this:

CMENU SYSTEM\mymenu.mnc;

The lines in this context menu are likely to point at macro commands defined specifically for the map in which it is included.