AppWizard creates two menus for you, shown in the ResourceView window in Figure 6.3. IDR_MAINFRAME is the menu shown when no file is open; IDR_SHOWSTTYPE is the menu shown when a ShowString document is open. Notice that IDR_MAINFRAME has no Window menus and that the File menu is much shorter than the one on the IDR_SHOWSTTYPE menu, with only New, Open, Print Setup, recent files, and Exit items.

FIG. 6.3 AppWizard creates two menus for ShowString.

You are going to add a menu item to ShowString, so the first decision is where to add it. The user will be able to edit the string that displays and to set the string’s format. You could add a Value item to the Edit menu that brings up a small dialog box for only the string and then create a Format menu with one item, Appearance, that brings up the dialog box to set the appearance. The choice you are going to see here, though, is to combine everything into one dialog box and then put it on a new Tools menu, under the Options item.

NOTE: You may have noticed already that more and more Windows applications are standardizing Tools, Options as the place for miscellaneous settings.

Do you need to add the item to both menus? No. When there is no document open, there is nowhere to save the changes made with this dialog box. So only IDR_SHOWSTTYPE needs to have a menu added. Open the menu by double-clicking it in the ResourceView window. At the far right of the menu, after Help, is an empty menu. Click it and type &Tools. The Properties dialog box appears; pin it to the background by clicking the pushpin. The Caption box contains &Tools. The menu at the end becomes the Tools menu, with an empty item underneath it; another empty menu then appears to the right of the Tools menu, as shown in Figure 6.4.

FIG. 6.4 Adding the Tools menu is easy in the ResourceView window.

Click the new Tools menu and drag it between the View and Window menus, corresponding to the position of Tools in products like Developer Studio and Microsoft Word. Next, click the empty sub-item. The Properties dialog box changes to show the blank properties of this item; change the caption to &Options and enter a sensible prompt, as shown in Figure 6.5. The prompt will be shown on the status bar when the user pauses the mouse over the menu item or moves the highlight over it with the cursor.

TIP: The & in the Caption edit box precedes the letter that serves as the mnemonic key for selecting that menu with the keyboard (for example, Alt+T in the case of Tools). This letter appears underlined in the menu. There is no further work required on your part. You can opt to select a different mnemonic key by moving the & so that it precedes a different letter in the menu or menu item name (for example, T&ools changes the key from T to o). You should not use the same mnemonic letter for two menus or for two items on the same menu.

All menu items have a resource ID, and this resource ID is the way the menu items are connected to your code. Developer Studio will choose a good one for you, but it doesn’t appear right away in the Properties dialog box. Click some other menu item, and then click Options again; you see that the resource ID is ID_TOOLS_OPTIONS. Alternatively, press Enter when you are finished, and the highlight moves down to the empty menu item below Options. Press the up-arrow cursor key to return the highlight to the Options item.

If you’d like to provide an accelerator, like the Ctrl+C for Edit, Copy that the system provides, this is a good time to do it. Click the + next to Accelerator in the ResourceView window and then double-click IDR_MAINFRAME, the only Accelerator table in this application. At a glance, you can see what key combinations are already in use. Ctrl+O is already taken, but Ctrl+T is available. To connect Ctrl+T to Tools, Options, follow these steps:

FIG. 6.5 The menu command Tools, Options controls everything that ShowString does.

Figure 6.6 shows the Properties dialog box for this accelerator after again clicking the newly entered line.

What happens when the user chooses this new menu item, Tools, Options? A dialog box displays. So, tempting as it may be to start connecting this menu to code, it makes more sense to build the dialog box first.