Changing the Window Appearance

Genero provides attributes that can be used to customize the appearance of windows, forms, and form objects in your application. In addition, you can create Presentation Styles to standardize the appearance of window and form objects across applications.

Some of the simple changes that you can make are:

Title

The default title for a window is the name of the object in the OPEN WINDOW statement. For example, in the programs we've seen so far, the title of the window is w1:

OPEN WINDOW w1 WITH FORM "custform"

In the form specification file, the attribute TEXT of the LAYOUT section can be used to change the title of the parent window:

LAYOUT (TEXT="Customer")

Icon

The Genero runtime system provides built-in classes, or object templates, which contain methods, or functions, that you can call from your programs. The classes are grouped together into packages. One package, ui, contains the Interface class, allowing you to manipulate the user interface. For example, the setImage method can be used to set the default icon for the windows of your program. You may simply call the method, prefixing it with the package name and class name; you do not need to create an Interface object.

CALL ui.Interface.setImage("imagename")

Window Style

By default windows are displayed as normal application windows, but you can choose a specific style using the WINDOWSTYLE attribute of the LAYOUT section of the form file. The default window styles are defined as a set of attributes in an external file (default.4st).

LAYOUT (WINDOWSTYLE="dialog")