CREATE MENU

Synopsis

CREATE [ OR MODIFY ] MENU module.name [ FOLDER 'folder_path' ] ( menu_item [ menu_item ... ] )
DESCRIBE MENU module.name
DROP MENU module.name

Where each menu_item is one of:

MENU ITEM 'caption' [ PAGE module.page | MICROFLOW module.microflow ] [ ICON module.collection.icon ] ;
MENU 'caption' [ ICON module.collection.icon ] ( nested_items ) ;

Description

Manages standalone menu documents (Menus$MenuDocument) — reusable menus that a menu widget on a page points at. Atlas_Core ships two of them, Phone_Menu and Tablet_Menu.

A menu document is not the menu inside a navigation profile, although the two are easy to confuse: both are built from the same menu items, which is why the item syntax here is identical to the MENU (...) block of ALTER NAVIGATION. They differ in where they live and how they are read:

OR MODIFY replaces the item list wholesale, exactly as CREATE OR REPLACE NAVIGATION does: the list you give is the document’s complete contents, so an omitted item is a removed item. The document’s identity, container and export level are preserved, so menu widgets pointing at it keep working.

DESCRIBE MENU emits a re-executable CREATE OR MODIFY MENU statement, so describe → edit → exec is the normal editing loop, and describe → exec → describe is a fixed point.

Parameters

module.name

Qualified name of the menu document.

FOLDER 'folder_path'

Optional. Places the document in the named module folder, creating missing folders in the path. On CREATE OR MODIFY this moves an existing document; omitting the clause leaves placement alone rather than returning the document to the module root. See MOVE.

'caption'

The item’s label, in single quotes.

PAGE / MICROFLOW

Optional target opened when the item is clicked. An item with neither is inert (stored as Forms$NoAction), which is normal for an item that only groups sub-items.

ICON

Optional icon, given as a qualified name into an icon collection — not a string. Hyphenated segments are double-quoted: Atlas_Core.Atlas."layout-2".

Examples

Create a menu with a nested sub-menu:

CREATE MENU MyModule.Main_Menu (
  menu item 'Home' page MyModule.Home_Web icon Atlas_Core.Atlas.home;
  menu item 'Run' microflow MyModule.DoThing;
  menu 'Admin' (
    menu item 'Accounts' page Administration.Account_Overview;
  );
  menu item 'Plain';
);

Replace its contents (the two omitted items are removed):

CREATE OR MODIFY MENU MyModule.Main_Menu (
  menu item 'Home' page MyModule.Home_Web icon Atlas_Core.Atlas.home;
  menu item 'Run' microflow MyModule.DoThing;
);

Read one back — including Atlas’s own:

DESCRIBE MENU Atlas_Core.Phone_Menu;

The type is auto-detected too, so the bare form works:

DESCRIBE Atlas_Core.Phone_Menu;

From the command line:

mxcli describe menu Atlas_Core.Phone_Menu -p app.mpr

Notes

A menu item cannot open a page that takes a required parameter. There is nowhere to supply the argument, and Mendix rejects the model with CE1571 (“No argument has been selected for parameter …”) reported against Menu item. Point the item at a parameterless page, or call a microflow that opens the page with its argument.

Only icon-collection icons round-trip. ICON writes a Forms$IconCollectionIcon. A glyph icon (which carries a numeric code) or an image icon cannot be expressed in MDL, so DESCRIBE reports those on their own comment line rather than dropping them silently:

-- icon a numeric glyph code (Forms$GlyphIcon) is not reproducible by CREATE MENU;
-- set it in Studio Pro

Re-running such output therefore loses that icon — visibly, not silently.

See Also

• ALTER NAVIGATION — the menu inside a navigation profile
• SHOW NAVIGATION — read profile menus and home pages