How to do it...

To create the menu structure, follow these steps:

  1. Add a new item to the project (select a folder node and press Ctrl + Shift + A).
  2. Select User Interface from the left-hand list and then Menu from the right.
  3. Type ConVMSVehicleManagement into the Name field and press OK.
  4. In the designer, create a label for Vehicle management and enter this as the menu's Label property.
  1. Right-click on New Menu in the designer and choose New | Submenu.
  2. Add the following labels for the submenus:
Name Label
Workspaces Workspaces
Vehicles Vehicles
ServiceOrders Service orders
PeriodicTasks @SYS76406
InquiriesAndReports @SYS3850
Setup @SYS333869
  1. We can add more submenus to help organize the structure, should this be required.
  2. Save and close the menu designer.
  3. Now, we need to extend the main menu so that we can navigate to our menu.
  4. In the Application Explorer, navigate to AOT | User Interface | Menus.
  5. Right-click on MainMenu and choose Create extension.
This creates an extension to the MainMenu menu, but does not customize (over-layer) it, allowing our change to sit nicely alongside the other extension of the same element without having to do a code merge, should a colleague also change the same element in a different project. In that case, they would suffix their extension with the project name (for example).
  1. Rename the new item in our project from MainMenu.ConVehicleManagement to MainMenu.ConVMSVehicleManagement.
A recent change in the development tools caused the naming extensions of tables, forms, and menus to be suffixed with the package name. This was ConVehicleManagement in our case. This isn't much different from the package name, but in most cases, it will be very different. For example, we must have a package named ConContractManagementSystem and the project could be ConCMSPurchOrderEntry –  we want to know the change was for the purchase order entry change at a glance.
  1. Open MainMenu.ConVMSVehicleManagement.
  2. Right-click on the root node and choose New | Menu reference.
  3. Set the Name and Menu Name properties to ConVMSVehicleManagement.
  4. Save and close the designer.