5 Adding Callbacks to the Application

5.4 Enhancing the task list manager

This concludes the tutorial on building application with DUIM. At this point, you can build and run a functional task list manager, but it is a very basic application. Chapter 6, "Using Command Tables", introduces command tables as a way of defining hierarchies of menu commands. To do this, it re-implements the menu hierarchy you defined in Chapter 4, "Adding Menus To The Application", but does not add any new functionality to the application.

There are many ways that the task list manager could be extended, and you might like to try experimenting with the code. To begin with, very little error checking has been written into the application, and you might like to add some in order to make the task list manager more robust. For example, it is currently possible to exit the task list manager and lose any changes in an unsaved list of tasks.

In addition to error checking, there is a wide range of new functionality you might like to add. A few ideas are listed below:

Re-implement the list box and radio box in the main window of the task list manager as a table control, so that the priority of each task is displayed next to the text for the task.
Implement the facility to define categories, so that tasks could be assigned categories such as "Home" and "Business". Categories could be listed in the table control alongside priorities.
Allow sorting the list of tasks according to a key. Tasks could then be sorted by priority or category.
Implement the ability to mark tasks as complete.
Allow users to add text memos to any task.

This is only a very limited list of ideas. After learning about command tables in Chapter 6, read through Chapter 7 to learn more about the features that DUIM provides. Then, using the DUIM Reference Manual as your reference source, get coding!