Built-In and User-Defined Properties

See Also

Windows Designer objects have many built-in properties that allow you to influence the way windows look and behave.

To the built-in properties, you can add properties that you define yourself. The main purpose of user-defined properties is to hold information carried over from or to other windows. In other words, you need to define properties if you want windows to interact in customized ways.

All USoft built-in properties have the String type, i.e. they can only have text-like values. User-defined properties can have text-like or object-like values. You can specify the property type you want in the Type field of the New Property dialog (the default is String).

User-defined properties are defined within the Object Activator. When defining a user-defined property, always make sure the root info window or dialog is selected in the Object Browser tree view (top-left).

If you want window B to influence the behavior of window A from which it was opened, give window B an object-like (a window-like) property of the same window type as window A. Pass A's identity to B when B is created. To refer to column values in A, you can use properties of type Variable.

If you just need to pass a string value from A to B at the time B is created, simply give B a user-defined property with type String.