7. Introduction

This part of the documentation describes the Form Designer, a GUI builder meant to help you interactively design dialogue forms for use with the Forms Library. This part assumes the reader is familiar with the Forms Library and has read Part I of this document. Even though designing forms is quite easy and requires only a relatively small number of lines of C-code, it can be time consuming to figure out all required positions and sizes of the objects. The Form Designer was written to facilitate the construction of forms. With Form Designer, there is no longer any need to calculate or guess where the objects should be. The highly interactive and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) nature of the Form Designer relieves the application programmer from the time consuming process of user interface construction so that he/she can concentrate more on what the application program intends to accomplish. Form Designer provides the abilities to interactively place, move and scale objects on a form, also the abilities to set all attributes of an object. Once satisfactory forms are constructed, the Form Designer generates a piece of C-code that can then be included in the application program. This piece of code will contain one procedure create_form_xxx() for each form, where xxx indicates the form name. The application only needs to call it to generate the form designed. The code produced is easily readable. The Form Designer also lets the user identify each object with C variables for later reference in the application program and allows advanced object callback bindings all within the Form Designer. All actions are performed with the mouse or the function keys. It uses a large number of forms itself to let the user make choices, set attributes, etc. Most of these forms were designed using the Form Designer itself. It is important to note that the Form Designer only helps you in designing the layout of your forms. It does not allow you to specify the actions that have to be taken when, e.g., a button is pushed. You can indicate the callback routine to call but the application program has to supply this callback routine. Also, the current version is mostly a layout tool and not a programming environment, not yet anyway. This means that the Form Designer does not allow you to initialize all your objects. You can, however, initialize some objects, e.g., you can set the bounds of a slider inside the Form Designer. Eventually full support of object initialization will be implemented.

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