User's Guide


Adding Notebooks

In this section, we will guide you through adding a notebook to the InvestmentApp you built in VisualAge Smalltalk Getting Started. Notebooks are useful tools for presenting loosely related information in an organized manner and closely mimic spiral bound notebooks in the real world. You will use the composition editor to construct a secondary window for each of the notebook parts supported by VisualAge When you are done you will access one of these notebooks from the menu of the investment application.

VisualAge provides three different notebook parts. They have strong similarities during application development but differ in their look-and-feel at run time and in their portability characteristics.

The VisualAge parts related to notebooks are:

OS/2 Category  OS/2 Category

OS/2 - Windows Notebook     OS/2 - Windows Notebook
Provides a notebook that will run on both OS/2 and Windows, but is not portable to UNIX.

canvcat  Canvas Category

PM Notebook     PM Notebook
Provides the look-and-feel of an OS/2 notebook that is portable to all supported VisualAge platforms.

Windows Notebook     Windows Notebook
Provides the look-and-feel of a Windows notebook that is portable to all VisualAge supported platforms.

Notebook Page     Notebook Page
Adds pages to one of the portable notebooks.

Your decision regarding which notebook to use will be based on portability, look-and-feel, and performance considerations. You will maximize your application's portability by using one of the notebooks in the Canvas category. The choice of the specific notebook will be based on the look-and-feel you want to achieve. However, if your application will only be deployed on OS/2 and Windows platforms, you will see better performance when using the OS/2 - Windows Notebook from the OS/2 or Windows category.

The investment application you built in VisualAge Smalltalk Getting Started had a menu item labeled Customer information. Let's build a notebook for this menu item that contains a page to present the following information for the customer:

  1. Account summary
  2. Stock portfolio summary
  3. Bond portfolio summary
  4. Mutual fund portfolio summary
  5. Address

We'll build this using each of the notebooks that VisualAge supports so you become familiar with each of them.


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