perl-win32-gui-users

[perl-win32-gui-users] Method for Clicking Menu Items?

[Veli-Pekka <vt...@ma...>]

Hi,
Is there a method I can call to programmatically click a menu item? I'm
planning on calling it in the Ctrl+N handler in my accelerator table. 

Menus do have onClick handlers that seem to work OK for me, but when I
try to execute a click method on a menu item when I know its name, I get
an error like this:

Can't locate object method "Click" via package "Win32::GUI::MenuItem"
...

My Win32::GUI version is 1.05 created 08 Nov 2006

I guess I could call the underlying subs that my menu items call, but
I'd rather have the keyboard control the UI, in stead. Its highly useful
for push buttons, for instance. As the hotkey pushes the button, the
user gets visual feedback and also as a screne reader user, I get
notified of the focus and button state change accordingly. is it
slightly "unorthodox" to click menus in hotkey handlers like that, in
staed of activating the underlying function? As a user I've always
disliked the fact that nothing visual happens when I save using the hot
key. SO I press alt+f, s in stead, and then the screen reader tells me
the file menu opens and closes confirming that something in deed
happened. Part of my desire to try the programmatic clicking of menu
items, too, would be to give this kind of visual feedback, even when the
hotkeys are used.
 
Any help appreciated. I've read through the docs on all menu related
controls and browsed through the Notepad example with no luck so far.
Most of the menu events have not been documented yet, I guess. My menu
is made with the highly useful, undocumented function
Win32::GUI::MakeMenu.


-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vt...@ma...)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila

Re: [perl-win32-gui-users] Method for Clicking Menu Items?

[Robert M. <rob...@us...>]

On 10/08/2007, Veli-Pekka T=E4til=E4 <vt...@ma...> wrote:
> Is there a method I can call to programmatically click a menu item? I'm
> planning on calling it in the Ctrl+N handler in my accelerator table.

Not that I'm aware of.

> I guess I could call the underlying subs that my menu items call, but
> I'd rather have the keyboard control the UI, in stead.

In C/C++ you'd create the Accelerator and Menu item with the same ID,
and the the OS would do this all automatically for you (both
Accelerators and Menu items generate WM_COMMAND messages, with a flag
set to indicate which was used, but I don't see a way to utilise this
functionality with Win32::GUI)

> Its highly useful
> for push buttons, for instance. As the hotkey pushes the button, the
> user gets visual feedback and also as a screne reader user, I get
> notified of the focus and button state change accordingly. is it
> slightly "unorthodox" to click menus in hotkey handlers like that, in
> staed of activating the underlying function? As a user I've always
> disliked the fact that nothing visual happens when I save using the hot
> key. SO I press alt+f, s in stead, and then the screen reader tells me
> the file menu opens and closes confirming that something in deed
> happened. Part of my desire to try the programmatic clicking of menu
> items, too, would be to give this kind of visual feedback, even when the
> hotkeys are used.

You could probably code the hotkey handler to post 'alt-f' and 's'
keystrokes to the thread's message queue, which might work.

Regards,
Rob.