A quick tour of the ArcPad Toolbar Manager

Legacy:

The ArcPad Toolbar Manager has been removed from the 10.0.2 install and has been replaced by the Toolbar Editor inside ArcPad. For more information, see Customizing Toolbars in ArcPad topic.

The ArcPad Toolbar Manager allows you to create or modify a toolbar configuration file (for example, ArcPad.apx, and so on) without the need of ArcPad Studio. To launch the ArcPad Toolbar Manager, go to Start > All Programs > ArcGIS > ArcPad 10 > ArcPad Toolbar Manager. When the application starts, it is presented with the following screen:

To create a new toolbar file, click on New. The Save As dialog box appears.

You will be prompted to create a file name for your new toolbar. The default location for toolbar files is My Documents > My ArcPad. The default file name is ArcPad.apx.

Tip:

If you create a new file name for your toolbars, the default file name can be changed within ArcPad (on the General tab of the Options dialog box).The toolbar configuration file path is stored inArcPadPref.apx.

Once you click Save, the following dialog box appears.

All the available tools are located on the left-hand side, and you can build your toolbars, submenus, and Quick Action button on the right-hand side.

The available tools are added by the drag and drop process as described below.

1. New toolbars are created by dragging the Toolbar tool to the right-hand window.
2. Tool buttons are added by dragging tools onto a toolbar.
3. Submenus are created by dragging tools onto an existing tool button.
4. Toolbars and submenus are modified by either dragging tool buttons and menu items to reposition them, or by dragging them out of the window to delete them.
5. Dragging one tool to the Quick Action button will create a single-click Quick Action button in ArcPad which will perform that one-tool action.
6. Dragging multiple tools to the Quick Action button will turn the Quick Action button into a menu, listing all of the tools.

The screen capture below displays the toolbars provided in the default ArcPad.apx file. You can use the default ArcPad.apx file as your starting point and remove or add tools as you wish.

The Quick Action button

The Quick Action button in ArcPad can behave as either:

1. A primary action button
2. A primary menu button

If only one tool is assigned to the Quick Action button, then clicking the button in ArcPad performs the action of that one tool. If you have one action in ArcPad that you perform above all others (for example, point capture), assigning this tool to the Quick Action button can make user training easy (just click the big ArcPad button).

If more than one tool is assigned to the Quick Action button, then clicking the button in ArcPad displays a menu. The default ArcPad.apx file has a number of tools assigned to the Quick Action button. When you click the Quick Action button, you will see the following: