Recently Used Items
- 3 minutes to read
Usually applications provide more features than end-users use in their everyday work. Removing all the features that are momentarily unnecessary from menus is not an option, since on occasion, these rarely used features are required. The ExpressBars Suite takes these points into consideration, and allows you to design menus using a functionality which dynamically controls the visibility of submenu items, dependent on their popularity.
Recently And Not Recently Used Items
Items within submenus can be divided into two groups: recently used and not recently used. Recently used items are always displayed when submenus are opened. Not recently used items are hidden when submenus are opened, as their visibility is controlled automatically, depending on the popularity of the items. An item will be classified as recently used after an end-user has selected the item a number of times.
End-users can access items not recently used via the double down-arrow at the bottom of a menu. They can hover over the arrow for a short time, or click it to immediately access these items.
The next image shows the same menu after the items not recently used are displayed.
Customizing Item Links
By default, all bar item links are recently used. At design time you can uncheck the Most recently used option in an item link’s customizing popup menu to specify that this link is not recently used.
In code, this can be done by setting the item link’s MostRecentlyUsed property to False.
Customizing Options
You can control which item links are classified as not recently used via a bar manager’s MostRecentItemsPercents property. This property allows you to indirectly determine the minimum number of clicks required to change item links’ classification, and make them visible. If the item link’s click count is less than this number, it will be hidden. If this property’s value is set to 100, all links will be classified as recently used, and visible. The lower the value, the quicker links that haven’t been used recently will be hidden.
To prevent links not recently used from being hidden, set the bar manager’s MenusShowRecentItemsFirst property to False. An end-user can also disable the most recently used items mechanism at runtime by unchecking the Menus show recently used commands first option within the Options page of the Customization Form.
The bar manager’s ShowFullMenusAfterDelay property specifies whether items not recently used should appear after a short delay, if the mouse pointer remains within the open submenu for a short time. This feature is in effect only if the bar manager’s MenusShowRecentItemsFirst property is set to True. To enable displaying not recently used items after a delay at runtime, an end-user can check the Show full menus after a short delay option within the Options page of the Customization Form.
To reset click counts for all the menus, classifying all items that can be accessed in menus (both recently used items and not recently used items) as recently used items and make them visible, call the bar manager’s ResetUsageData or ResetUsageDataWithConfirmation methods. An end-user can do this by clicking the Reset my usage data within the Options page of the Customization Form.