Change Window Title Dynamically

This page describes how to set the title of an Application Form dynamically. Changing the title may not be required, but usually done to indicate the currently displayed record of a populated form.

There can be several reasons to why the title should be changed. The first thing to consider is where to place the update code so that the title reflects the state of the form. A title that should reflect the current record will need to keep track of when the record is populated and perhaps even saved. A title that reflect a more static situation like a users connected country will require less frequent changes, where the feature activate event is likely to be adequate.

In this example the title is changed to reflect the country that the form is currently showing information for.

To achieve this a translatable string resource should be created. The string resource should be created with parameter placeholders.

1. In your Visual Studio solution explorer, expand the Properties folder and open the designer for the Resources.resx file.
2. Add a string resource to be used for the title.

    

   Name	Value	Comment
   AreaOverviewTitle	Areas of Country '&0 - &1'	This constant is used to set the title of ..

3. Override vrtActivate and call your utility function
4. Every time Sal.SetWindowText  is called, the string constant can be used together with TranslateConstantWithParams. The string will in in runtime be translated, but we still need to replace our &[n] placeholders with current values. To achieve this,  we pass the translated string together with an array of values that should replace the placeholders.

#region Overrides

public override SalNumber vrtActivate(fcURL URL)
{
    SetWindowTitle();
    return base.vrtActivate(URL);
}

#endregion

#region Methods

/// <summary>
/// Set the window title according to current area and country.
/// </summary>
public void SetWindowTitle()
{
    SalArray<SalString> sItems = new SalArray<SalString>();

    sItems[0] = sCountryId;
    sItems[1] = sCountry;

    Sal.SetWindowText(i_hWndFrame, 
        Ifs.Fnd.ApplicationForms.Int
        .TranslateConstantWithParams(Properties.Resources.AreaOverviewTitle,
                                     sItems));
}

#endregion

Figure 1: This example overrides vrtActivate and calls SetWindowTitle, which sets the window title using TranslateConstantWithParams.