This documentation addresses the more experienced GUI programmer and describes essential programming techniques. There are two ways to program in the dialog editor:

• Use the dialog editor's menu bar and toolbar to create new dialogs or dialog elements and use the attributes window to assign attribute values to them. The dialog editor will internally generate the corresponding Natural code.

• Open an event-handler section or an inline-subroutine section and specify Natural code explicitly. This code will be added to the code that is generated internally. You can also enter parameter data areas, global data areas and local data areas in the corresponding definition sections.

You can view the current dialog's generated and specified code by choosing Object > List in the dialog editor's menu bar.

If you want a hands-on demonstration of how to program with the dialog editor, refer to the SYSEXEVT library. This library contains sample dialogs demonstrating basic functionality. Before accessing the sample dialogs, read the README file. Then execute the MENU dialog.

If you want to execute a Natural application using dialogs, you must use a dialog to start this application.

For further information on event-driven programming see Introduction to Event-Driven Programming.