Overriding the UcompOS Default MenuBar Item

The Menu Bar on the UcompOS Portal by default has a built-in menu item as displayed below:

You can override this default Menu Bar item in one of two ways.

First, in the application manifest for a particular application, you can specify the model for the Menu Bar that should be present when the application is in focus.

A sample Menu Bar model for a very simple File Management application may look something like this:

<menu>
	<menuitem label="File">
		<menuitem label="Open" data="open"/>
		<menuitem label="Close" data="close"/>
		<menuitem label="Quit" icon="http://apps.ucompass.com/exit.png" data="quit"/>
	</menuitem>
</menu>

As a relevant aside, the UcompOSWindowProxy has a setMenuBar(); method that accepts an XML object as input of the same form shown above. This lets you specify the model for the Menu Bar that should be in display while a particular window is in focus.

So you can have multiple windows spawned by the same UcompOS application all with different Menu Bar implementations. This is a very important capability.

What if you want to override the default UcompOS menu item and have 100% unique branding.

You can do this by building a baseMenu model into the application manifest.

For instance, my Educator 2 Menu Bar default Menu Bar item looks like this:

Here is the relevant code from my Application Manifest that articulates the base menu item:

<baseMenu>
	<menuitem label="" icon="http://applications.ucompass.com/Educator2PortalFoundation/images/Educator2_Menu_Bar_Icon.png">
		<menuitem label="About Educator 2" data="About Educator 2"/>
		<menuitem type="separator"/>
		<menuitem label="Logout" data="Logout" />
	</menuitem>
</baseMenu>

The setMenuBar(); method of the UcompOSMenuBarProxy class also has a second Boolean parameter named baseMenu. When you set a Menu Bar and pass true as the value for this parameter, that model will override the default UcompOS MenuBar implementation.

Overriding the default UcompOS MenuBar is just one of many ways to create a 100% unique and customized experience for users of your Rich Portal Application.