PCMenu

Copyright (c) 1988 by J. Eric Slone, All rights reserved

Distributed by J. Eric Slone
5500 Holmes Run Parkway, #501
Alexandria, Virginia 22304

Phone: (703) 461-7078


If you use this program and find that it is helpful, please send a small
donation ($5.00). In return, I will keep you up to date about revisions
and other useful programs which I release from time to time.


PCMenu is a windowed menuing system which may be easily used in batch files
and in applications development (i.e. dBase) for professional looking pop-up
menus. The program syntax is:


pcmenu [x] [y] [menufile] [title] {[tag] [out] ([nf] [nb] [hf] [hb])}

Where [x] and [y] are the coordinates for the upper left hand corner of the
menu. The range of coordinates is [0 < x <= 80] and
[0 < y <= 80]. If the number of options or the width
of the options cause any part of the menu to fall off of
the screen, the program will abort. There are a maximum
of 20 options allowed, none of which may be over 30
characters wide.

[menufile] is the name of the file containing the menu options. Each
option should be on a line by itself and right padded with a
space. See the sample program MENU.BAT for an example of
how to set up a menufile.

An additional option which may used is the time and date
window. To include this in your display, include the line:

-XX YY MM

in your menu file as the last, or second to last, option
if the status bar is used. The - sign runs the time/date
option in the quiet mode. If a + sign is used, the
computer will play a tune at the beginning of each hour.
The last option, MM will designate if the clock is to
display time in the 12 or the 24 hour mode. If it is
omitted, the time will default to the 24 hour mode.

Another option which may be included in the menu file
is the status bar option. This option should be the last
option in the menufile. The syntax for this line is:

#RR XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Where # is the first character in the line
RR is the row to display the status bar in
XX is the data to display in the status bar

The status bar will be displayed using the highlight colors
centered in the row specified. The last character in the
option line defining the status bar MUST be a carriage
return (ASCII 13).

[menu title] is the title for the menu. If no title is desired, merely
type a hyphen (-) for the title. If the title contains
more than one word, be sure to enclose it in quotes (see
MENU.BAT).

[tag] The tag for the menu defaults to numbers which may be typed
instead of using the cursor keys. Other tags which may be
used are letters (no RETURN required), or no tags (uses
cursor or mouse to select item). The options used are N
for numbers (program default), L for letters, and B for
blanks (no tags).

[out] Normally, the selection number is returned as a value to
DOS's errorlevel. Since some applications may require
another means to read the selection, this option is
provided to send the selection item to a file named
PCMENU.DAT. Specifying an F will activate this option.
If there is a need to output a variable assignment to
the file, specify the option as Fvar where var is the
variable to write to the file (i.e. rc = 3). If the option
is specified as E, an environment variable, PCMENU will be
set to the option selected.

[nf] [nb]
[hf] [hb] are the optional colors for the menu. The four variables
represent the normal and highlighted foreground and
background colors. The valid numbers for colors are:

BLACK 0 BLUE 1 GREEN 2
CYAN 3 RED 4 MAGENTA 5
BROWN 6 LIGHTGRAY 7 DARKGRAY 8
LIGHTBLUE 9 LIGHTGREEN 10 LIGHTCYAN 11
LIGHTRED 12 LIGHTMAGENTA 13 YELLOW 14
WHITE 15