Progress
AppBuilder
Developer’s Guide


AppBuilder Preference Options

To begin setting AppBuilder-specific preferences, choose Options Preferences. The dialog box opens at the General options tab:

You can set or clear as many of these options as you like:

WebSpeed Options Tab

If you have WebSpeed installed, you can use AppBuilder as your layout editor for both standard and Web applications. If you do not have WebSpeed installed, you will not see this tab. Your Preferences dialog box will only have the General, Grid Units, and Print tabs:

You can change any or all of the settings here, if the default values do not meet your needs:

Grid Options Tab

One of the hallmarks of good design is that things line up neatly. Graphic designers solved this problem by lining things up against a grid, originally printed on their workspace in a pale, cool-blue ink that was visible to the human designer but not to the platemaking camera.

AppBuilder provides a similar grid to help you lay out your widgets neatly in the application workspace. You can make it visible to you, but it is never visible to the users of your application:

You can choose a grid spacing in this tab. It will apply only to graphical Frames; the character Window has a fixed size. If you plan to run your application in both GUI and character-cell contexts, you might wish to define your grid to be 1.0 x 1.0 characters in size, and take care not to consume more than 80 x 21 cells for any single layout.

Once you have a grid defined, choose Options Snap to Grid to cause your widgets to automatically jump to the closest grid intersection, if you release the widget nearby. Choose Options Display Grid to make the grid lines visible to you as a series of dots. The two options are independent of one another.

Note that any changes you make to the grid spacing here will apply only to Frame objects you create afterward, not to objects that you have already created. The Snap and Display menu item settings apply immediately to all existing and future workspaces, however.

Print Options Tab

The Print options tab gives you some control over the way AppBuilder will print the source code it generates for you:

The Font and Page Length items are self-explanatory. If you clear the Use Print Dialog Box setting, AppBuilder will queue all subsequent print requests to the default printer immediately, without opening the Print dialog box.


Copyright © 2004 Progress Software Corporation
www.progress.com
Voice: (781) 280-4000
Fax: (781) 280-4095