Instrumenting Menus

A week or so ago I was asked about tracking menu hits in the Visual FoxPro application I am working on for a client. This application is vintage late 1990's so there is no single procedure/object to process menu hits. Each pad/bar has it's own little procedure that run some code. So, I did what I do anytime I am asked to implement something new... I googled it. I found a wonderful article titled Instrumenting FoxPro Applications by Rod Paddock. It was written in 1997. So, the article confirmed what I already knew, I was in trouble because there was not a central menu execution object in this application.

Next I stumbed across the Extending the VFP 9 IDE with MENUHIT and MENUCONTEXT article by Doug Hennig. Ok, so first of all, Intellisense is available at runtime now. I spoke on this a while back. Next, intellisense has exposed "generic" menu events. So, I should be able to use this to instrument my menu without adding code to each menu item. Yes I could! Here is how I did it:

1. I opened my FoxCode table and copied it to the application's data directory and deleted all of the records.


2. I added one new record to the application specific FoxCode table with the following field values:
   
   Type = 'S'
   Abbrev = 'MENUHIT'
   Data = The following program code.
   
   

   
   LPARAMETERS ;
      toParameter
   
   LOCAL ;
      loSelect AS Object, ;
      lcBar AS Character, ;
      lcPad AS Character
   
   loSelect = CREATEOBJECT('cSelect')
   lcBar = UPPER(ALLTRIM(toParameter.MenuItem))
   lcPad = UPPER(ALLTRIM(toParameter.UserTyped))
   
   *!* do not track use by developers
   IF VERSION(2) <> 0
      RETURN
   ENDIF
   
   SELECT 0
   USE MenuTrack
   LOCATE FOR UPPER(cBar)  = lcBar AND UPPER(cPad) = lcPad
   
   IF NOT FOUND()
      APPEND BLANK
      REPLACE cBar with lcBar, cPad with lcPad
   ENDIF
   
   REPLACE nCount WITH nCount + 1, ;
      dLastHit WITH DATETIME()
   
   USE IN SELECT("MenuTrack")
   

   
   
   
3. Then, in my main program I added the following lines of code:
   
   

   
   IF FILE(‘FOXCODE.DBF’)
      _FOXCODE = ‘foxcode.dbf’
   ENDIF
   

   
   

It works beautifully and now we are able to track which menu items are called and which ones are called most often. Thanks Rod and Doug!