Menu Structure

The menu system controls what displays when a user logs in. It is designed like a product structure, recorded as single-level relationships between a parent menu item and a child item. At the top level in the character UI, the parent item is the Main Menu (Menu 0).

Note: The menu groups represented by the folders in the .NET UI are referenced through the letter A. For example A.1 is Sales, A.2 is Manufacturing and so on.

At lower levels, the parent item is a submenu such as the Call Management Menu (11.1) or an executable function.

Menus are stored in a table indexed by language ID. Each user has a default language. When a user logs on, the system determines the user language and displays menu text in that language.

As a user moves through menus and makes selections, the Execution File specified in Menu System Maintenance controls the function or submenu that displays. Selecting 2. Addresses from the Main Menu sets the Execution File to 2, telling the system to access Menu 2. Selecting 12 from Menu 2 sets the Execution File to admgmt06.p, telling the system to run Company Address Maintenance.

QAD applications are delivered with all offered menus and functions. You can remove menus for programs that you do not use by either taking them off the menu or controlling them with menu security.

Note: It is easier to update your software releases if menus are not modified. Instead, use menu security for functions you do not use. In the character UI, you can set up User Menus for commonly used menus and functions. In the .NET UI, each user can use the Favorites feature to define a personal menu subsystem of commonly used functions.

Users can only see functions they have been given access to, based on their role membership. Menu items are assigned to roles in Role Permissions Maintain (36.3.6.5). Each user is assigned to one or more roles in Role Membership Maintain (36.3.6.6) in the context of specific domains and entities.

When a user logs in, the system builds the menu for that user based on the login domain and entity (workspace in the .NET UI) and the set of roles assigned to the user. The menus represent the combination of all functions the user has access to in that domain and entity.

Note: When logging in through the character UI, a user must have access to the primary entity of the selected domain; in the .NET UI, the workspace represents any valid domain/entity combination for which the user has been granted access.

When you add an item to the menu, access must be explicitly granted before anyone can see that menu item and run the function, including yourself. You must use Role Permissions Maintain to add the menu item to the appropriate roles.

Note: Users cannot run any program that is not on the menu. If you want users to be able to run custom programs or utilities from an application session, you must add the program to the menu and give the appropriate user roles access to it.