Visualization Tools User's Guide


Finding Out How an Application is Launched

To find out how an application that is normally accessed through a menu is actually launched, you can probe into menus.

Note:For this procedure to work, you must have already made at least one actual use of the menu entry of interest. Also, for menus produced using the VisualAge builder, you should instead use CompEdit to open a composition editor in order to see what actions result from a menu entry. Finally, in certain circumstances, probing the menubar as described below actually results in a normal probe of the menubar widget, rather than a probe of the associated menus.

To find out, for example, how a hierarchy browser is started up (perhaps for purposes of being able to start it under control of a debugger), you could:

  1. Open a Widget Scope as above.
  2. Click the Probe button.
  3. Click the Tools button in the System Transcript menu bar.
  4. In the resulting prompter, double-click Tools, and then double-click Browse Hierarchy.
  5. In the scrolled window of the Widget Scope, click the Menu Button - ... line
  6. Click the Inspect button at the bottom of the Widget Scope.
  7. In the resulting inspector, click selector, and see that the message #openHierarchyBrowser is sent whenever the menu button is pushed. Then click owner, and see that the message is sent to the class EtDevelopment. Finally, select Browse Class from the Variables menu of the inspector, and peruse the openHierarchyBrowser public class method in the ET-Internal category of the class.

Congratulations! In less than a couple of minutes, you too can now launch hierarchy browsers!


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