Before you begin, you must complete Exercise 7.3: Selecting the DDS object.
You will spend most of your time creating, updating, and designing your DDS screens and reports in the Design page. The Design pages allow you to design your screens or reports visually using an intuitive graphical user interface. The Design page shows the DDS source as it would appear on either a screen (for display files) or a printed page (for printer files). It allows you to design your application's screens or reports by laying out records and fields in a graphical user interface.
On the Design page, you can easily create, edit, resize, and move DDS objects graphically. You can create new records, fields, and constants directly on the Design page by using the palette push buttons to the left of the Design area or from the pop-up menus. The toolbar above the Design area allows quick access to many of the editing features as well as information about the currently selected object.
In order to understand where MAIN_MENU came from, you need to understand the concept of a group. A group is simply a collection of one or more DDS records that represent how a screen or report would be assembled at runtime. It allows you at development time to work with screens or reports as they would appear when they get assembled by your programs at runtime. To work with groups in CODE Designer you need to tell CODE Designer which record formats make up a screen. In this case this has been done for the screen you see in the Design page. A group MAIN_MENU has been created for you and CODE Designer has saved this information in the DDS source in comment lines. Any groups that you create are persisted as comment lines in the DDS so you can re-use these groups in subsequent CODE Designer sessions.
The groups you create will appear in the tree view as well as in the workbook as a Design page tab for each group defined, to allow quick access to each group of records.
You have seen the concept of a group, specifically the MAIN_MENU group and you are ready to begin Exercise 7.5: Creating groups from existing records.
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