Simple Form

PML Customisation User Guide

Form Concepts: Getting Started : Simple Form

You define a form using a command sequence that starts with:

Between these two commands come a number of optional subcommands which define the gadgets on the form.

The following example defines a small form, containing the text ‘Hello World’, and a button labelled ‘Goodbye’, which removes the form when pressed:

layout form !!hello AutoAlign

 paragraph .Message text 'Hello world'

 button .bye 'Goodbye' OK

exit

Figure 13:1.

A Simple Form

Some points to note about the above definition and the form it creates are:

•

there are no user-defined methods on this form, and so the layout form . . . exit sequence is the complete form definition;

•

the paragraph command adds a paragraph gadget to the form (a paragraph gadget is just a piece of text displayed on the form). The name of the gadget is Message, and the dot before the name indicates that the gadget is a member of the form. The text itself is specified after the keyword TEXT.

•

the button subcommand adds a button gadget named .bye. The text on the button will be ‘Goodbye’. The keyword OK is a form control attribute that specifies that the action of this button is to remove the form from the screen. (For more about form control attributes, refer to Form Attributes.)

To display the form in this example, you can use the command:

show !!Hello