Most context-sensitive popup menus are defined by a set of files of the form POPiiii.CTL where iiii uniquely identifies the particular popup menu. The popup file menu, for example, has the name POPFL.CTL.
Lines within a popup menu definition file contain four fields:
Popup Menu ID. Popup Menu IDs are of the form POPiiii where iiii uniquely identifies a particular subordinate popup menu. This item is always specified for subordinate popup menus (see Attribute field below) and usually not specified for pupup menu items.
Attribute. The first position of this field is used to comment a particular line. If the first position contains an asterisk (*), the line will be ignored. Other values are ignored, i.e., the line is processed normally.
The second position contains one of the following:
M indicates that this line describes a subordinate popup menu.
I indicates that this line describes a popup menu item.
- indicates that a separator line is to be provided.
The rest of the positions of the attribute field are reserved for future use.
Item Description. This is the text that will be displayed on the popup menu. If the item description contains a broken vertical bar (|), the broken vertical bar will be replaced with a tab character, which will cause text following the broken vertical bar to be displayed in the right column of the menu. If the item description contains a tilde character (~), the character following the tilde will be underlined.
Actual command invoked. When an item is selected from a popup menu, this is the command that BIM-EDIT/XP will invoke.
BIM-EDIT/XP builds a particular popup menu when mouse button two is pressed while the mouse is pointing at an object for which a context sensitive menu is defined. While processing the popup menu, if a subordinate popup menu (the second character of the attribute field is a M) is specified, the file containing the items for the popup menu is processed. For example, if the popup menu ID is "POPFLCT", the file POPFLCT.CTL is processed. In this manner the popup menu and subordinate popup menus are built.
For any popup menu file, the startup routine searches for the file first in the specific user directory (if user not "DEFAULT"), then the default user directory, then in the site directory, and finally in the system directory. Since the distributed popup menu files are stored in the system directory, the popup menu structure can be customized by placing selective popup menu files in either the site or user directories. The popup menu logic will then process the customized version of the particular popup menu.