Creating a custom presentation

To add a menu to a CommonPoint program interface, you need to add it to the presentation. The presentation for a given program is controlled by a presenter. The presenter is responsible for managing all the presentable aspects of a document component, for example, views, menus, tool palettes, and dialogs.

The difference between a presenter and a view is important:

A view provides a visual representation of the data in a model.
A presenter manages the presentation of a view along with the user interface elements that let end users interact with that view.

In the previous steps, the Tiles program used the default presenter provided by the Presentation framework, TGUIPresenterFor<TTilesView>. For each Tiles document component, this default presenter:

Creates and displays a TTilesView
Binds the view to the model for the document component by passing the view a TGUIBundle
Creates a standard window in which to display the view
Includes the standard CommonPoint menu, including the Document and Edit menu items

If you want a presenter to provide different or additional user interface elements, you need to derive your own. This step demonstrates how to create a presenter that extends the main menu, and how to build a document component based on this presenter using one of the Presentation framework stationery template classes. The new menu contains items that let the user change any selected tiles to red, green, or blue, and items that let the user add a particular type of tile to the model:

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