This section describes the design and building of menu structures for traditional application systems. If you are designing an action bar driven system you should still read this section (from a different perspective), because action bars are often initially invoked from menus.
Once the entire application system has been broken down into a series of processes and functions it is possible to consider how its online components will be fitted together into a menu structure (assuming that you intend to use LANSA to build your menus).
Using the example application system described in the previous section, we can visualize it as a series of independently accessible menus as follows:
| No Format |
|---|
|
CUSWRK CUSREP ORDWRK
| | |
------ ----- -----|------
| | | | | | |
CUS001 CUS002 CUS003 CUS004 ORD001 ORD002 ORD003 |
| No Format |
|---|
|
PROWRK PROREP TABWRK
| | |
| ------ ------
| | | | |
PRO0001 PRO002 PRO003 TBL001 TBL002 |
However, taking it one step further, by using the "process attachment" capability of LANSA (described in Other Processes on the Process Menu in the LANSA for i User Guide), we can quickly create a generalized "menu" (actually a new process called SYSMNU) for end users of this system. This could be visualized like this:
| No Format |
|---|
|
SYSMNU
|
-----------------------------------------------
| | | | |
CUSWRK | CUSREP | ORDWRK
| | | | |
------ | ----- | -----|------
| | | | | | | | |
CUS001 CUS002 | CUS003 CUS004 | ORD001 ORD002 ORD003
| |
| |
PROWRK PROREP
| |
| -------
| | |
PRO0001 PRO002 PRO003 |
...