>>>While working on localization of software into different language, I ran into an annoying "quirk" of the Menu Designer in VFP -- it tries to be helpful in naming menu pads and menu popups according to text you've typed. Unfortunately this causes names of menu pads and popups to change -- which causes problems later on where they need to be referenced by name (e.g. add-on modules will "hook" into specific menus). Does anybody know there are any directives or settings that can be used to keep VFP from replacing the names that I've already put in place? What is perhaps a bit confusing is that sometimes the object naming is forced and sometimes not -- thus far I think I've found that the general pattern is that if I make gross change to the text (e.g. complete replacement), the object name is changed based on text you've entered, and object name doesn't get changed if I keep text change to be incremental (i.e. only change portion). Although it should be possible to avoid running into this problem by careful editing in this manner, the method of operation is non-obvious and perhaps a bit over-tedious and would be hard to explain to members of the development group. So I'm basically stuck having to re-check menus every time someone works on them to make sure that the menu pads and popups that need to be referenced by name are indeed properly named.
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>>You can specify names for menu pads in the Options for the pad.
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>>Tamar
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>Yes, that's what I've been using -- unfortunately it appears that if I make gross changes to the prompt text, the menu pad name I've specified on the option page is overridden -- usually with a truncated version of the new prompt text. As far as I've been able to determine, if I only make incremental changes to the prompt text, the override doesn't occur -- basically it seems to be related to what was selected in the input field before I started typing. As long as I avoid having the entire text selected when I start typing, it appears that the override is avoided. The problem is, that typically when modifying menu prompt text for a different language, one generally wans to change all of the text -- thus forcing an update of the menu pad or popup name.

If you're working on translating your app to other languages, hard-coding the prompts is NOT the way to go. Check out the INTL Toolkit: http://stevenblack.com/intl/

Tamar