10.16 Action Bar Panel Design Considerations

The following points are things that you should consider when planning or designing screen panels to use in conjunction with an action bar:

• The action bar may push the "panel body" that you are working with down to line 3 (1 to 6 action bar choices), 4 (7 to 12 action bar choices) or even 5 (13 to 18) action bar choices.

• The automatic "Help" action bar choice will use up one of your available action bar choices. So if you plan on 6, you may actually get 7, thus removing one more line from the available "panel body" that you have to work with.

• Consider suppressing panel identifiers at the partition level or by individual use of the PANEL_ID(*NONE) parameter on the DISPLAY and REQUEST commands that form the "panel body".

• The text that you use to identify each action bar option and pull down choice should be set up according to the guidelines prescribed by the CUA 1989 standard.

• Where an accelerator key is associated with a pull down choice you must include the CUA 1989 prescribed "Fnn" text manually. This requirement is not automatically implemented.

• Full multilingual support is provided for all end user visible text in action bars, including DBCS and bi-directional languages.

• Action bars and pull down menus used in bi-directional language systems are effectively "reversed".