Q: We use AppendMenu to create pop-up menus of
user-defined objects. The objects are named by the user. We have a
"menu resource stub" which we load, append to, and subsequently
dispose of, when the user clicks in the appropriate location. However,
there's a problem with this strategy. AppendMenu strips
meta-characters, which it recognizes as instructions for determining
menu characteristics such as command key equivalents or styles. Is
there any way in which we can ask AppendMenu to ignore
such characters?
A: If the Menu Manager function AppendMenuItemText is
available, use it. (It was introduced in Mac OS 8.5 along with
InsertMenuItemText.)
If not, the following code should help:
menu = GetMenuHandle (kSomeMenu);
AppendMenu (menu, "\pscratch");
SetMenuItemText (menu, CountMenuItems (menu), "\psome / text");
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This works in all cases but one relatively obscure one. SetMenuItemText sets the menu item text just as requested. However,the standard menu definition
function ('MDEF') interprets any item with a leading hypen as a divider. To overcome this obstacle, prepend a 0 byte to the string before calling SetMenuItemText. This byte will not result in anything being drawn in the menu item, but will fool the MDEF into doing what you want.
Further Reference:
Inside Macintosh: Menu Manager
[Dec 22 1998]
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