Configuring Control Properties

When you select a control in the Screen Designer, the Property window lists the control's name and all of the properties currently associated with that control. The properties listed vary according to the control type, so the properties listed for a bitmap control, for example, are going to be very different from the properties listed for an entry field.

When you select multiple controls in the Screen Designer, the Property window lists only those properties that apply to all of the selected controls. If you change one of these properties, the change is applied to every one of the selected controls.

The default Property settings for each control type, as well as the properties that appear in the Property window, can be configured through the Tools > Options interface, as discussed in Establishing Screen and Control Defaults.

Detailed information about all of the available control properties can be found in ACUCOBOL-GT User Interface Programming.

To change control property settings in AcuBench:

  1. In the Screen Designer, select the control on the screen form. The control name appears in the drop-down list at the top of the Property window.

    Note that if you have selected multiple controls, only the name of the last control selected is shown.

  2. Use the Alphabetic or Categorized tab of the Property window to scroll through the available properties and find the one you wish to change.
  3. Click in the Value column next to the property description to change the control’s property settings. In some cases, this activates an entry field in which you can type the new value. In other cases, you may select the value from a drop-down list, or click a browse (...) button to open a secondary interface used to specify a property value. In general, the first property changed for each control is the (Name) property from the AcuBench default to something more descriptive. As with the screen itself, this (Name) property is used to assign a control name used to refer to the control programmatically. AcuBench also uses this value to construct the default names for paragraphs and variables associated with the control, so assigning a descriptive name plays an important role in keeping your code readable and intuitive. If you are tempted to skip this step and use the default names, imagine trying to code a screen full of entry fields called Screen1-Ef-1, Screen1-Ef-2, Screen1-Ef-3, and so on. Now imagine an entire application full of screens and fields using that same default naming convention.