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Adding Menu Items
Elevator uses a system of asterisk symbols (*) to denote which level a menu item should be added to. Items on the first level (visible when Elevator first starts) have no asterisk. Items on the second level have one asterisk; on the third level, two asterisks; on the fourth level, three asterisks; and so on. The asterisks are placed before the text to be displayed (ie. straight after the = sign).Elevator supports up to 8 levels of menu items, so the maximum number of asterisks you can use is 7. (As a point of interest, if you assume that you'll use all 8 levels and you'll always have just 5 items visible at a time, that's a potential of around 400,000 menu items! Did we say Elevator was a powerful system?) In the example code below, only one entry (How to Register) will be shown when Elevator starts. Clicking that entry will show a second level containing Buy Online, Buy By Fax and More Purchase Options. Clicking on 'More Purchase Options' opens a third level containing Purchase by Check and Register with Cash.
Item1=How to Register The numbering of the Item parameters is vital. Elevator reads those parameters sequentially, and determines how to group each item it reads according to what item is at the next-lowest level. For example, the Purchase by Check and Register by Cash items are to be placed at the 3rd level, so Elevator checks to see which the last 2nd-level item was (More Purchase Options), and creates a third level menu for that item. To illustrate this, we've altered the Item numbers for a few items below. Now, the Purchase... and Register... options will be shown when the Buy By Fax item is clicked. Item1=How to Register The URL, Target and Message parameters for each item are added using the same number suffixes as the Item parameters. There are no asterisks to bother with for these parameters, so a URL for Item3 above could be: URL3=fax.htm. To create a separator-line on the menu, you still use the asterisk symbols in the same way (to tell Elevator which level the separator appears on), but type a hyphen (-) as the text to be displayed.
Note: Because the numbering of the Item parameters (and their URL/Target/Message parameters) is important, if you need to insert an item somewhere in the menu later, the items below it will have to be renumbered. For this reason, we recommend using our free Design Studio application to create and edit datafiles. This makes the job a whole lot faster, and removes the chance of numbering mistakes such as using the same number twice or skipping a number.
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