Building a Menu

This section lists the main steps for building commands and menus for a custom application. Follow this procedure for creating menus for individual application pages, the global My Desk, Actions, and Search menus as needed to implement the custom application's functionality.

For details on parameters and settings available for menu and submenus, see Parameters for Toolbar Menu Objects and Settings for Toolbar Menu Objects.

Before you begin:
Important: When customizing existing menus and commands and you do not want to include a defined menu/command, do not delete it. Instead, hide it using access controls. Future upgrades may be designed to update those menus/commands, and if they have been deleted, the update will fail.

The JSPs to execute the menu commands must have already been created.

  1. Using Business Modeler, create a command object for every link that should be added to a menu:

    1. Click Object > New > Command.
    2. On the Basics tab, enter these details:


      • Name. You can use the underscore (_) and hyphen (-) characters, but no other special characters. For naming conventions, see Naming Conventions.
      • Description
      • Label. The Label is the text that displays to the user when they open the menu.

    3. On the Link tab, enter the name of the JSP that should be invoked when this command is selected.
    4. On the Settings tab, enter name/value pairs as required for the command. At minimum, you need to define a value for the Registered Suite.
    5. On the Access tab, define who can access this command. Typically, access is defined by role and not specific usernames. For example, anyone with a Librarian role has access to a command for creating a library.
    6. Click Create.

  2. Using Business Modeler, create a menu object to organize the commands created in Step 1. You can create as many menu layers as is appropriate for your application.

    1. Select Object > New > Menu
    2. On the Basics tab, enter these details:


      • Name. You can use the underscore (_) and hyphen (-) characters, but no other special characters. For naming conventions, see Naming Conventions.
      • Description
      • Label. The Label is the text that displays to the user.

    3. On the Link tab, enter the name of the JSP that should be invoked when this command is selected. Most menus will not have an Href defined; this option is sometimes used by application pages that define tree menus. See About Navigation Trees.
    4. On the Settings tab, enter name/value pairs as required for the command. See Settings for Toolbar Menu Objects. At minimum, you need to define a value for the Registered Suite.
    5. On the Items tab, add each command or menu required for this menu.
    6. Click Create.

  3. To see your changes in the user interface, log in as a user with the Administration Manager role and click > Utilities > Reload Cache and click the browser Refresh button.

    The cache is refreshed automatically when the component age expires as defined in emxSystem.properties.