Hi Team,
Actually, we have migrated our Applications from Pb 12.5 to Appeon 2022 R3.As there are many new features related to UI in Appeon 2022. I want to enhance the menus of my application with new features of Appeon 2022 without putting too much effort at code level. Can you please Guide how can we implement new features of UI in terms of button and menus. Is there any guide which can help us to implement this change?
Waiting for the feedback.
Thanks,
Amna Khalid
Hi.
As you are upgrading from PB 12.5, the most important changes you may find are themes (which may affect any standard visual control). You can look the following links as a start:
Specifying application properties - - Users Guide
ApplyTheme - - PowerScript Reference
Themes will affect how menus show as the colors will be based on theme, as shown in following screenshot:
Here the Dark Theme is used.
Another important change we have in later releases (R2 & R3), is the modernization of graph control. This one works without requiring any change (in case of course your application is using graph control or graph datawindows).
Another change has to do with the ability to use a TabbedView in MDI windows. This change also happens with minimal changes to your application (just two setting need to be adjusted: TabbedView and MaximizeAllTabbedSheets properties on your mdi frame).
Finally there is a ribbonbar available, but for this one, I would agree with Chris, you should wait for PB 2025 which will support an easy menu to ribbonbar transformation.
If you want to see how themes work, you can take a look to SalesDemo Example application that ships with PowerBuilder 2022R3. There you may be able to see how easy you can switch theme, and how an application is affected. Another thing to mention is that themes are customizable, that meaning you have a lot of flexibility to create your own themes.
Andreas.
There is a whole part of the documentation dedicated to explain themes and what is possible while using them. I suggest you take a look at the following link:
Specifying application properties - - Users Guide
The easiest way to choose a theme is to set it in you application object -> Properties -> Additional Properties...
A window will show up where you have to set the theme to use:
After applying the theme you want, the application should run using it (form the IDE).
Of course, you may want to set a theme during runtime. This can be done by using the applytheme functrtion:
// Example: setting a theme to the application's open event...
ApplyTheme("Flat Design Blue")This will be ok when running the application from the IDE. For runtime, you need to set a relative path to the application, or a full path, to the folder where the theme will be located (you need to deploy the themes you want to be available to your application). All those are documented in the above link.
To remove a theme when your application is running, you have to create a custom theme that has {“drawing”:false} for every control type, and use this theme in the ApplyTheme method, as well documented in help file.
But, as I said in the beginning: the first thing you should do is to read the documentation and see what is possible. That way you may decide if this feature covers or not your needs.
Andreas.
If you want to enhance your menus with little effort, I would recommend to upgrade to PB 2025 and use the new RibbonView feature for Menu object. Here is some more info about that: https://docs.appeon.com/pb/whats_new/Displaying_MDI_Menu_as_RibbonBar.html
And while you are modernizing UI, some other great low effort features are UI Themes and TabbedView MDI.
So after you turn on the 3 features I mentioned (RibbonView, TabbedView MDI, and UI Themes), then your app could look like this with very little effort:
