Each of HyperActiveMenu's parameters is explained below, with reference to the clickable example code in the left frame: you can click a parameter from the example code to jump to its explanation, or simply read this page from top to toe. As you read, click the red references to other parameters to jump to them.
Most of HyperActiveMenu's parameters have a default setting which is mentioned below. If the default setting is the option you'd like to use in your own implementation, you can leave that parameter out of your HTML code.
The 'Archive' attribute & 'CabBase' parameter
JAR (Java ARchive) and CAB (cabinet) files are archives containing Java class files in compressed form, making them easier to handle and quicker to download. Most modern browsers are able to read one or other of these formats, and the Archive attribute and CabBase parameter tell the browser the name of the archive file to open. The .JAR, .CAB and .CLASS files must all be in the same directory, and the CODEBASE= attribute is used in the normal way, if required, specifying the absolute or relative location of this directory. Older browsers that are unable to read either the JAR or the CAB file will instead read the loose CLASS files.
Applet Width & Height
Increasing or reducing the width will make the buttons & menus wider or narrower, thus allowing for longer Label and Entry strings. You'll usually want to make the applet as narrow as you can (to save page space!), but check that the text on your menus isn't being cut off. Browsers tend to vary a little in their spacing of text in Java™ applets. To be safe, check your pages in Netscape which applies rather more space to a line of text than Internet Explorer, or visitors to your page that use Netscape might be missing a view characters on the longer labels.
You'll want to make the height as short as possible too. Judge the height of the applet relative to what the applet looks like when you open the menu containing the most entries.
Quick Tip: When setting up the applet dimensions, it's far easier if you use the BgColor parameter to temporarily set the applet background to a color that stands out from your page background. When you've reduced the dimensions as much as you can, return the BgColor setting to the color you wanted.
Copyright
This parameter must be included or the applet will not run, whether registered or unregistered. To prevent mistakes we recommend that you copy/paste it into your code from the Getting Started page: it is case-sensitive, single-spaced throughout and should appear on a single line. If there's a problem with this parameter, you'll see a status-bar message that reads "Copyright parameter missing or incorrect" which should lead you to the problem.
Name
Specifies a unique name for an applet when used with the Cool Focus Satellites system. This name may be anything you like, but it should be the only applet currently running that has this name. If you're not using the Satellites system, you can ignore this parameter.
Satellites
A simple yes or no parameter that determines whether or not this applet should send mouse-move information to the Cool Focus satellites system. If you are using Satellites, include this parameter with a value of 'yes'. If you're not, either set the value to 'no', or leave out this parameter. Setting this parameter to 'yes' when no Satellite is being used will have the effect of making the applet respond to the mouse extremely sluggishly.
BgColor
The applet's background color as a hex triplet. This is visible below the buttons when the no menu is being displayed. For best results, set this to the same value as that of your page's body-background. The default is 000000 (black).
ButtonColor
Hex triplet for the color of the buttons. This is a 3D button, so it's best to stick with 'mid-range' colors such as C0C000 or 008080 to ensure that the applet can derive lighter and darker shades for the button-highlight and button-shadow. The default is 000080 (navy).
MenuColor
The color of the menus as a hex triplet. This is another 3D item, so apply the same guidelines as for ButtonColor. The default is 000080 (navy). Of course, there's no reason why your buttons and menus should be the same color.
LabelColor
A hex-triplet for the color of the button-label's text and arrowhead symbol when unfocussed (the mouse isn't over the button). The default is 0000FF (bright blue).
LabelFocusColor
The color of the button-label's text and arrow when focussed (the mouse is over the button). The default is C0C0C0 (silver).
LabelPressColor
The color of the button-label's text and arrow when the button is depressed (clicked, not sad). The default is 808080 (dark gray).
LabelSelColor
The color of the button-label's text and arrow for the selected button (the one that was clicked and whose menu is being displayed). The default is 00FF00 (lime green).
EntryColor
The color of the text for menu-entries when unfocussed. The default is C0C0C0 (silver).
EntryFocusColor
The color of the text for a focussed menu-entry. The default is 00FF00 (bright green).
EntryPressColor
The color of the text for a menu-entry when clicked. The default is 808080 (dark gray).
ButtonHeight
Specifies the height of the buttons. In early versions of HyperActiveMenu, the height of each button was fixed at 22, and the default value for this parameter is still 22. You can make the buttons taller or shorter by using this parameter with a different value, perhaps when using a larger or smaller LabelFont size, or just for aesthetic reasons.
Sound
Specifies whether or not you'd like the applet to play sounds in response to mouse-clicks. The value can be either yes or no, and neither is case-sensitive. (The default value is no.) If you want to use sounds, note that you must direct the applet to at least one Sun/NeXT format (.au) audio file using any or all of the four following parameters.
SoundButtonDown
The path (if necessary) and name of the audio file to be played when a button is clicked. See Using Sounds, below. Paths to audio files are specified as URLs and may be either absolute or relative to the location of the current HTML page.
SoundButtonUp
The path (if necessary) and name of the audio file to be played when the menu's button is released. See Using Sounds, below.
SoundEntryDown
The path (if necessary) and name of the audio file to be played when a menu entry is clicked. See Using Sounds, below.
SoundEntryUp
The path (if necessary) and name of the audio file to be played when a menu entry is released. See Using Sounds, below.
Using Sounds: HyperActiveMenu is very forgiving in its sound support. If Sound is set to 'yes' but none of the four parameters above are included (or their audio files can't be found) HyperActiveMenu will still work properly (albeit silently). Therefore, if you only wish to have audio accompaniment for button-clicks (for example), simply remove the SoundEntryDown/Up parameters.
DefaultTarget
HTML offers it's own range of recognized targets for links: _top, _self, _blank and _parent. But when you use an applet like HyperActiveMenu that can take countless links, you'll often be opening your pages into a main frame in your browser, perhaps called 'Main', so almost every entry on the menu will need a Target parameter with the value "Main". The DefaultTarget parameter gives you a way to avoid entering all those parameters. Just enter the name of this frame in the DefaultTarget parameter and it will be used by default for any entry on your menu that doesn't have its own Target parameter to override it.
The default setting for this parameter is _top, so if you leave this parameter out, any menu entry that doesn't have its own Target parameter will open its document full-screen in the current window.
Arrows
A simple and non-case-sensitive yes or no to whether the arrow symbol on the butons should be shown or not. The default value is yes, meaning that the arrows will be shown.
LabelFont
A comma-delimited string giving the name, style and size of the font you want to use for all button labels. The default settings are Helvetica, in bold, at size 12, which would be written as Helvetica,bold,12. Two important things to note: first, there must be no spaces in this entry; second, the three items must appear in the order name,style,size. Note that the style part of this setting can be plain, bold, italic or bolditalic, and these are not case-sensitive. You can adjust the ButtonHeight parameter to create a large enough button for large font sizes.
EntryFont
Another comma-delimited value giving the name, style & size of the font to use for menu entries, with the default value Dialog,plain,11. Note that although the size of this font is variable, the relative spacing of entries on the menus is not. Thus, if you increase the size of the font too much, entries will begin to overlap. In addition, if this size is very large or very small, the reactivity of the mouse passing over an entry will be less effective, since the 'hot spots' at which the entry color focusses are fixed in postion. The two extreme font sizes at which the reactivity is still bearable are 9 and 14. (The TimesRoman & Courier fonts will stand the larger fonts better than Dialog and Helvetica.)
3D
An option to use a 3D effect for the button-labels. The default setting is Off (no effect). There are three options that can be used to 'turn on' the feature: Color allows the applet to derive its own color for the 3D effect based on your selections for LabelColor, LabelFocusColor and LabelPressedColor. In this mode, if you choose black for any color option option, HyperActiveMenu will use gray for the 3D effect. The Color mode is recommended as the best place to start. With some combinations of text/button colors, the Color mode will make the text hard to read (an example is LabelFocusColor 0000FF, ButtonColor 008000). To get around this, two further modes are available: LightGray and DarkGray. These allow you to choose one of two shades of gray to add effect without obscuring the text. The sacrifice you make in these modes, however, is that the same shade of gray will be applied to your LabelColor, LabelFocusColor and LabelPressedColor (that's why we suggest you start with Color mode!). The four values for this parameter are not case sensitive.
UseHandCursor
A yes or no parameter that determines whether or not a typical 'web-style' hand cursor is used when the mouse moves over an entry on the menu. The default value is yes, so you need include this parameter only if you want to set it to 'no' and stick to the default pointer. This feature is applied only when an applet is running in a Java 1.1-compatible browser (Internet Explorer 4x or higher, Netscape Navigator 4.07 or higher). In other browsers, this parameter is ignored and the default pointer will be used.
Note: for the following parameters, each set shown below applies to the top button and is prefixed with 1-
In the example code to the left, only parameters for this top button have been included, since the only difference in the parameter names for the 6 possible buttons & menus is the numerical prefix.
To create the parameters for button two, change the prefix to 2-
To create the parameters for button three, change the prefix to 3-
To create the parameters for button four, change the prefix to 4-
To create the parameters for button five, change the prefix to 5-
To create the parameters for button six, change the prefix to 6-
Of course, if you're using less than 6 buttons you won't enter parameters for the buttons you don't need.
1-Label
The text to appear on the button. The default is Button 1 (and so on, for the remaining five buttons). This text will be automatically centered on the button, both horizontally and vertically, but longer strings might crowd (or overlap) the arrow symbol. If so, just increase the applet's width.
1-MenuSize
Enter a figure (from 1 - 15) for the number of entries this menu will contain. The applet uses this parameter to determine how long each menu should be to display its entries. In addition, the applet uses this parameter to determine how many buttons you want the applet to have (to a maximum of 6). If parameters are found named 1-MenuSize, 2-MenuSize and 3-MenuSize, the applets knows you want 3 buttons. Therefore it's important to remember to include this parameter, and not to miss out any numbers. For example, if you include a 5-MenuSize but forget to include a 4-MenuSize, the applet will stop searching at 3 and you'll get only 3 buttons.
1-Entry1, 1-Entry2, . . . 1-Entry15
The text-strings to appear on the menu portion of the applet. These will be left-aligned. For longer strings, increase the width of the applet. If you only want twelve entries on your menu, you won't include parameter tags for 1-Entry13, 1-Entry14, or 1-Entry15. That's probably obvious.
1-URL1a, 1-URL2a, . . . 1-URL15a
The URL of the page you want the corresponding 'Entry' to fetch when clicked. This may be an absolute URL ("http://www.fishing.net/tangled/") or a relative URL ("../../another/page.htm"). Note that although Java does support #name anchors appended to URLs (to link to particular parts of a page), not all browsers will react correctly to it, so its use is generally best avoided.
In fact, HyperActiveMenu can open up to four separate URLs when an entry is clicked. Therefore, along with the usual numerical addition that matches the URL parameter to its corresponding Entry number, the letters a, b, c and d are tagged onto the end. In most cases you'll only want to open a single URL from each entry, so your parameter names will all end with an a, as in the example code to the left.
There are two points to bear in mind about using multiple URLs. First, the URLs will be fetched one at a time (although they should appear almost simultaneous) in the abcd order. This leads to the second point: if one of those URLs will load a page over the top of the applet, the applet must stop running. Therefore, if you're trying to load 4 pages, using all four URL parameters, and your 1-URL2b parameter is the one that loads over the applet, the 1-URL2c and 1-URL2d links won't work - the applet stops running before it can process the requests!
As an aid to testing, you can prefix your URLs with a dollar sign ($). You can then click the applet without error messages appearing or being linked elsewhere.
1-Target1a, 1-Target2a, . . . 1-Target15a
Allows you to specify a frame- or window-name into which each of the URL links should be opened. Once again, the number after 'Target' corresponds with an Entry number, and the a,b,c,d additions correspond with the URL parameters. If a URL parameter exists and has no corresponding Target parameter, the target used will be the DefaultTarget.
Remember that frame names are case-sensitive. If you're trying to make something open in a frame and your browser persists in opening a new window for it instead, check that the case and spelling of the name match in the Target parameter and in your HTML <frameset> tag.
1-Message1, 1-Message2, . . . 1-Message15
A text-string you want displayed in the browser's statusbar when the mouse passes over the corresonding Entry, usually giving some clue to the linked page. Unless you enter this parameter, no status-bar text will be displayed.
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