Chapter 10 Chapter 10This chapter discusses two very different but equally useful aspects of Frontier, suites and agents. It includes one example for each, an activity tracker suite and an agent appointment reminder.A suite is a collection of one or more scripts, optional data, and an optional menubar, designed to work together to accomplish a certain task. Some of Frontier's features are implemented as suites, for example, the Object Database map). Many Frontier experts have creates suites to share with others -- perhaps you will be next!
A Frontier agent is a UserTalk script that runs as a background process at specified intervals.
You can think of a suite as an application that is written in UserTalk and runs from the Frontier environment. A suite has its own table in the suites table. The table contains one or more scripts and associated data, ranging from a few constants (such as favorite color or date of last backup) to outlines, word processing documents or even tables of additional information. Many suites also have a custom menu. When correctly installed, it can be selected from the Suites menu.If a suite has a menu, the suite's table must include:
The menubar object usually contains a single menu, but more are allowed. (Of course, be aware that small monitors may not have room for many extra menus.) The main suite menu should generally include 2 standard items, usually at the end:
- a menubar object named "menu"
- a script called installMenu that installs "menu" on the menubar
These items are optional, though many script writers will come to expect them.
- Edit Menu, Command-M -- open the suite's menu into the menubar editor
- Edit Table, Command-T -- open the suite's table
Contents Page | Next Section -- Example: Activity Tracker Suite
HTML formatting by Steven Noreyko January 1996, User Guide revised by UserLand June 1996