Designing the part
A good design is crucial to anything that you do. If the pirate ship had a flawed design, the crew's lives would be at risk and nobody would set sail. Designing a part is by no means a life-or-death situation, but a poorly designed part could require redesign every time you want to extend or modify it. Maintenance could also prove to be a problem.
The clipboard tool bar part is a simple part, allowing for a simple design. Because it must be embeddable into other windows, the Form part is a good choice for the foundation. Our goal is to enable a developer to use the tool bar by making simple connections. (This is what visual programming is all about.) Hence, an event must be signaled when the user clicks on any of the three tools. This enables the application developer to connect each event to an action, like copySelection. So, the design is as follows:
• The primary part is a Form.
• Three push buttons are added to the Form part. Push buttons are a good choice because they signal an event when they are selected. Also, a graphic can appear on the push button's face instead of text.
• When each button is clicked, it will cause the tool bar to signal an event, so that users of the tool bar can know which button was selected.
Let's build the part!
Last modified date: 01/29/2015