How To Customize Menus and Toolbars in Reflection Desktop Classic Mode

Applies to Reflection Desktop

This video shows how to create a custom menu and add menu items that open a Web URL and an application. It also shows how to add buttons to a toolbar that run a legacy Reflection macro and send text to the host.

Audio Transcript:


0:08 - 0:25
You can create or modify menus and toolbars for working in Reflection Classic mode.

This video shows how to add new items to a menu to open an application and open a Web page. It also shows how to add buttons to a toolbar to send text and run a legacy Reflection 14 macro.

0:26 - 0:46
With a session open in Reflection Desktop, open the UI Designer.

How you get there depends on the type of session you’re running.

If you’re in a Classic VT Session, select Toolbars on the Setup menu.

For a Classic IBM session, you’ll select Toolbars on the View menu and then select to modify the currently selected Ribbon file.

0:49 - 1:07
The UI Designer allows you to modify or create menus and toolbars when you’re using the Classic interface. 

We’ll create a custom menu and add a couple of menu items to open a Web URL and open an application. 

Make sure the main menu bar is selected so we add this custom menu at the top level.

1:08 - 1:19
We’ll change the name of the menu to custom, with an accelerator key so you can open this menu from the keyboard.

Now we’ll add and item to open the Web URL.

1:22 - 1:30
First, we’ll add the text for the menu item.

Then we’ll associate this item to an action. We’ll choose Open URL and set up our action to open microfocus.com.

1:33 - 1:37
Reflection provides a number of actions that you can associate with menu or toolbar items.

1:39 - 1:50
Now we’ll add a menu item to open an application in the same way.

We’ll add the text for the item and then select the Launch Application action.

1:53 - 1:55
Now we’ll browse to the executable file we want to add. 

2:01 - 2:08
We’ll just map to NotePad but you can map to any desktop application that you frequently use.

2:09 - 2:52
Now let’s set up a couple of toolbar buttons.

First, we’ll add a button to run a legacy Reflection 14 macro in this session.

We’ll select an icon for the button…

And add a tooltip… 

And then select the Run External Legacy Reflection Macro action to run the macro.

Then we’ll browse to the macro.

Keep in mind that when you add a button to a session macro, the button will only work for that session. If other sessions use this toolbar, it won’t work for them.

2:53 - 3:17
We’ll add another button to send text to our application, in the same way.

We’ll add the label for the button…

And select our image…

And then select the Send Text action and type in the phrase we want to send.

We’ll finish up by adding a tooltip for this button.

3:18 - 3:40
Now let’s test our menu and toolbar.

When select to open our Web application, it opens in a Web browser. And our menu item that opens Notepad, works just fine also.

When we test our button to run a macro, we see that it runs as expected. And the button to send text works as well.

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How To Customize Menus and Toolbars in Reflection Desktop Classic Mode