Adding Notebooks
In this section, we will guide you through adding a notebook to the InvestmentApp you built in Getting Started. Notebooks are useful tools for presenting loosely related information in an organized manner and closely mimic spiral bound notebooks in the real world. You will use the composition editor to construct a secondary window for each of the notebook parts supported by VA Smalltalk. When you are done, you will access one of these notebooks from the menu of the investment application.
VA Smalltalk provides three different notebook parts. They have strong similarities during application development but differ in their look-and-feel at run time and in their portability characteristics.
The VA Smalltalk parts related to notebooks are:
Canvas Category 
PM Notebook Provides the look-and-feel of an OS/2 notebook that is portable to all supported VA Smalltalk platforms.
Windows Notebook Provides the look-and-feel of a Windows notebook that is portable to all VA Smalltalk supported platforms.
Notebook Page Adds pages to one of the portable notebooks.
Your decision regarding which notebook to use will be based on portability and look-and-feel considerations. You will maximize your application's portability by using one of the notebooks in the Canvas category. The choice of the specific notebook will be based on the look-and-feel you want to achieve..
The investment application InvestmentApp you built in Getting Started had a menu item labeled Customer information. Let's build a notebook for this menu item that contains a page to present the following information for the customer:
1. Account summary
2. Stock portfolio summary
3. Bond portfolio summary
4. Mutual fund portfolio summary
5. Address
We'll build this using each of the notebooks that VA Smalltalk supports so you become familiar with each of them.
Last modified date: 07/13/2020