Note: This is a work in progress and many formatting issues have been fixed. Read more about the project on the home page.

menuMessage

set [the] menuMessage of menuItem of menu to "messageName [parameterList]"

The menuMessage property returns or sets the message sent to the current card when the user chooses a menu item from a menu.

The menuMessage property returns empty if the menu item has no associated message.

HyperCard’s default menu items have no associated messages sent to the current card unless they have been explicitly set with this property.

A doMenu handler can override a menuMessage.

Examples

get the menuMessage of menuItem 1 of menu "Help"

if it is not empty then ...

set the menuMessage of menuItem "Print" of menu "File" to "myPrint"

set the menuMsg of menuItem 2 of menu 2 to "beep"

set the menuMsg of second menuItem of second menu to ¬

  "set the visible of field 1 to not the visible of field 1"

Placeholders

menuItem

An expression that evaluates to one of the following:

menuItem text

menuItem posInteger

ordinal menuItem

For example:

menuItem "New"

menuItem 2

second menuItem

messageName

Any text string, without quotation marks, that represents the name of the message handler you want to write:

calculateDebt

selectWholeLine

As in:

on calculateDebt

on selectWholeLine theLine, aContainer

parameterList

A comma-separated list of local variable names.

The actual names don’t matter as long as they’re not the same as one of HyperCard’s reserved words. (That is, don’t use result as a variable name.) For example:

var1

var1,var2,var3, var4

fieldName, N, numberOfCharacters

menuMessage