THE HYPERCARD CENTER Search

Help Extras

Home » Help Extras » Helpful Tips » Menu behavior

Menu behavior

You can handle menu events from your scripts in two ways.

First, HyperCard sends a doMenu message, so you can write a doMenu handler to respond to the event.

Second, if you do not handle the doMenu message, HyperCard checks the menuMessage property of the menu item. If it finds a message there, HyperCard sends this message to the current card. So you can also write a handler for this message to respond to the event.

Note: Because HyperCard sends the doMenu message first, a doMenu handler will always override a specific handler meant to handle a menuMessage.

Other tips:

• You can just disable or delete the Tools, Patterns, Font, and Apple menus. HyperCard does not allow other operations on these menus, such as setting a Command character. (But you can modify the first item in the Apple menu.)
• You can use the set, get, put, delete, enable, and disable commands with menus that aren’t currently visible (perhaps because the menu bar is hidden, the user level is set too low, or a different tool is chosen).
• For HyperCard’s standard menus, the doMenu command always works, even if an item is deleted or not available. For example, the following handler will quit HyperCard:
on mouseUp
delete menuItem "Quit HyperCard" ¬
from menu "File"
doMenu "Quit HyperCard"
end mouseUp
• If you add a menu item with the same name as one of HyperCard’s standard menu items, the new item inherits the same behavior as the standard item; but HyperCard will not check, enable, or disable the item automatically.

« Mark cards from the Message box | Helpful Tips | Move a shape while creating it »