Tivoli Service Desk 6.0 Developer's Toolkit Interface Designer Guide

Chapter 4: Designing Notebooks

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Introduction

Overview

Notebooks are a useful means of organizing related forms in an application. In a notebook, each tab has a corresponding form in a resource file.

To create a notebook you must:

The sections that follow give you the basic information for adding a notebook and setting its properties, defining the notebook tabs, and testing the notebook.

Note: Notebook properties override the properties of the forms they contain.

Adding a notebook

To add a notebook:

  1. Open the Interface Designer.
  2. Open a resource file that has forms associated with it.
  3. On the Forms tab, choose Add Notebook.

Notebook Properties

Overview

Notebooks are similar to forms in that they, too, have properties that you can set to determine how the notebooks look and behave. You use the Pages tab to define forms as tabs in the notebook.

The following table describes properties on the Pages tab.

Property Description
Tab Position Indicates the tab location on a notebook page. Note: In Windows, tabs can only be located on the top.
Tab text Indicates the tab text of the tab
Form Indicates the name of the form contained in the .df file

You can also arrange the tabs. See "Rearranging notebook tabs" for instructions.

Using Notebook Properties

Setting notebook properties

Setting properties for a notebook is similar to setting properties for a form. You can set different properties for each notebook in a resource file.

Note: If you set your preferences to show property sheets automatically when a new form or notebook is created you can avoid steps 3 and 4.

To set properties for a notebook:

  1. Open a resource file.
  2. Do one of the following:
    - If a notebook exists, double-click its file name in the Form ID column on the Forms tab.
    - If you need to add a notebook, from the Forms tab, click Add Notebook.
  3. Position the mouse pointer anywhere in the notebook, except the title bar, and right-click.
    From the pop-up menu, choose Properties.
  4. Set the properties for the notebook.
  5. Choose OK.

Creating Notebook Tabs

Adding tabs to a notebook

You create notebook tabs from the forms in a resource file. Like forms, you can set different properties selected for each tab in a notebook.

To add a tab to a notebook:

  1. Open the Interface Designer.
  2. Open a resource file that contains at least one form.
  3. Do one of the following:
    - If a notebook exists, double-click its file name in the Form ID column on the Forms tab.
    - If you need to add a notebook, from the Forms tab, click Add Notebook.
  4. Position the mouse pointer anywhere in the notebook, except the title bar, and right-click.
  5. From the pop-up menu, choose Properties.
  6. Choose the Pages tab.
  7. Under Form Name, select the name of the form that you want to include as a tab in the notebook.
  8. In the Tab Text box, type the text that you want to see on the tab.
  9. Under Tab Position, select the position where you want the tab to appear.
  10. Choose Add.
    Result: The tab text appears in the Tab Text group box with the form description.
  11. Choose Apply.
  12. Review the notebook pages.
  13. Continue adding tabs or choose OK to quit.

Working with Notebook Tabs

Rearranging notebook tabs

To rearrange notebook tabs:

  1. Open the Interface Designer.
  2. Open a resource file that contains at least one form.
  3. Do one of the following:
    - If a notebook exists, double-click its file name in the Form ID column on the Forms tab.
    - If you need to add a notebook, from the Forms tab, click Add Notebook.
  4. Position the mouse pointer anywhere in the notebook, except the title bar, and right-click.
  5. From the pop-up menu, choose Properties.
  6. Choose the Pages tab.
  7. Under Notebooks, select the tab you want to rearrange.
  8. Choose Move Up or Move Down.
  9. Choose Apply.
  10. Review the appearance of the notebook form and the page positions.
  11. Continue rearranging tabs or choose OK to quit.

Editing notebook tabs

Editing notebook tabs involves editing the page properties, not the form associated with the tab.

To edit a notebook tab:

  1. Open the Interface Designer.
  2. Open a resource file that contains at least one form.
  3. Do one of the following:
    - If a notebook exists, double-click its file name in the Form ID column on the Forms tab.
    - If you need to add a notebook, from the Forms tab, click Add Notebook.
  4. Position the mouse pointer anywhere in the notebook, except the title bar, and right-click.
  5. From the pop-up menu, choose Properties.
  6. Choose the Pages tab.
  7. Make changes to any of the properties on the Pages tab that need to be altered.
  8. Choose Apply.
  9. Choose Apply or OK.
    Result: All applied properties take effect on the notebook tabs.

Removing notebook tabs

You can delete every notebook tab without deleting the notebook, but every notebook must have at least one tab; otherwise an error message appears.

To remove notebook pages:

  1. Open the Interface Designer.
  2. Open a resource file that contains at least one form.
  3. Do one of the following:
    - If a notebook exists, double-click its file name in the Form ID column on the Forms tab.
    - If you need to add a notebook, from the Forms tab, click Add Notebook.
  4. Position the mouse pointer anywhere in the notebook, except the title bar, and right-click.
  5. From the pop-up menu, choose Properties.
  6. Choose the Pages tab.
  7. Under Notebooks, select the page you want to delete from the list.
  8. Choose Delete.
  9. Choose Apply or OK.

Deleting notebooks

To delete a notebook:

  1. Open the Interface Designer.
  2. Open the resource file that contains the notebook that you want to delete.
  3. Select the notebook you want to delete.
  4. Choose Delete.

Tivoli Service Desk 6.0 Developer's Toolkit Interface Designer Guide

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