5.5 Application-Defined Menu Items

Application models can define custom menu items that appear under the Application menu in the main ArtiSynth menu bar.

This can be done by implementing the interface HasMenuItems in either the RootModel or any of its top-level components (e.g., models, controllers, probes, etc.). The interface contains a single method

which, if the component has menu items to add, should append them to items and return true.

The RootModel and all models derived from ModelBase implement HasMenuItems by default, but with getMenuItems() returning false. Models wishing to add menu items should override this default declaration. Other component types, such as controllers, need to explicitly implement HasMenuItems.

Note: the Application menu will only appear if getMenuItems() returns true for either the RootModel or one or more of its top-level components.

getMenuItems() will be called each time the Application menu is selected, so the menu itself is created on demand and can be varied to suite the current system state. In general, it should return items that are capable of being displayed inside a Swing JMenu; other items will be ignored. The most typical item is a Swing JMenuItem. The convenience method createMenuItem(listener,text,toolTip) can be used to quickly create menu items, as in the following code segment:

This creates three menu items, each with this specified as an ActionListener and no tool-tip text, and appends them to items. They will then appear under the Application menu as shown in Figure 5.8.

To actually execute the menu commands, the items returned by getMenuItems() need to be associated with an ActionListener (defined in java.awt.event), which supplies the method actionPerformed() which is called when the menu item is selected. Typically the ActionListener is the component implementing HasMenuItems, as was assumed in the example declaration of getMenuItems() shown above. RootModel and other models derived from ModelBase implement ActionListener by default, with an empty declaration of actionPerformed() that should be overridden as required. A declaration of actionPerformed() capable of handling the menu example above might look like this: