About Creating and Editing Pull-Down and Shortcut Menus (VBA/ActiveX)

AutoCAD ActiveX/VBA has the ability to customize two types of AutoCAD menus: pull-down menus and shortcut menus (sometimes called cursor menus).

Both pull-down and shortcut menus are displayed as cascading menus. The shortcut menu can provide quick access to frequently used menu items such as Object Snap modes.

A pull-down menu can contain up to 999 menu items. A shortcut menu can contain up to 499 menu items. Both limits include all menus in the hierarchy. If the number of menu items in a menu exceeds these limits, AutoCAD ignores the extra items. If a pull-down or shortcut menu is taller than the available space on the graphics screen, it is truncated to fit on the screen.

Pull-down menus are always pulled down from the menu bar, but the shortcut menu is always displayed at or near the crosshairs on the graphics screen. The handling for both menu types is the same except the shortcut menu caption is not included on the menu bar. The shortcut menu caption is not displayed at all. Access to the shortcut menu is through a single menu in the base menu group. The shortcut menu can be identified with the ShortcutMenu property. If the ShortcutMenu property returns TRUE, then the queried menu is the shortcut menu for the group.