7.3 The "Object" Menu

The "Object" menu always appears as the left most menu in a WinBase's menubar. The "Object" menu for each object is used to perform file based actions on the object itself. Many of these actions involve the use of a file requester dialog. See section 7.19 File Requester. These actions on the object can also be called through css (e.g., the Print action can be called from css as `object.Print()'). The "Object" menu has the following menu actions:

Load
Load a text object dump of an object of the same class as this object on top of this object, replacing the values of fields of this object with the values of the saved object's fields. The saved object file is selected with the file requester.
Save
Save a text object dump of this object in a file created with the file requester, or with the object's most recently used filename for saving.
SaveAs
Save a text object dump of this object in a -new- file created with the file requester.
Edit
The Edit menu action brings up an Edit Dialog on the object. See section 7.6 The Edit Dialog.
Close
The Close menu action will attempt to close/delete the object. If the object is referenced or pointed to by other objects, then it will not actually be deleted, only the windows which display it will be removed. The user must confirm the deletion if it is possible to safely delete the object. NOTE THAT CLOSE IS NOT ICONIFY!, it really does delete the object, not just close the menu.
Copy From
Copies from another object of the same or related type -- replace all of the current data in the object with those in another. In the menu, only the same or subtypes of this object will be shown, but in the script, any type of related object can be passed to this function.
Copy To
Copies the data in this object to another object. This can be useful if you want to copy from a more basic type of object (e.g., Environment) to a derived type (e.g., FreqEnv) -- CopyFrom won't show the more basic type of object to copy from, but CopyTo will show the derived type.
Duplicate
Makes another copy of this object -- creates a new object and then copies from this current object to that new object. Note this is DuplicateMe in the script code.
ChangeType
Changes the type of this object to be another related type (e.g., change to a FreqEnv from an Environment). Will usually do a good job of updating the various links to this object if changed. Not good for objects within a network, or generally for Stat objects that are aggregated. This is ChangeMyType in the script code.
Help
Will automatically pull up a help browser for information relevant to this object. Depends on the browser actually running on your system, as specified in the Settings on the root object.
Print
The Print menu action will save a snapshot of the entire object's window to a file in Postscript format using a file requester. Note that this printout file uses structured graphics so it will scale well if resized, etc.
Print Data
The Print data menu action will save a snapshot of the window's data, not including the menubars and window decoration, to a file in Postscript format using a file requester.
Update Menus
If objects are created or deleted, sometimes the menus of their parent objects can become out of date. If this appears to be the case then use the "update menus" menu action on the parent object to fix the menus. The "update menus" menu action recursively traverses the menus of the object and its subobjects, adding and deleting menu items appropriately.
Iconify
This will iconify the window (shrink down to an iconic representation, to get it out of your way).