About the Property Pages tab

An interface extension can provide property pages and wizard pages that are used by the Meridian Enterprise clients to help the user enter and edit property values. These pages are extended by the Interface Extension designer as Visual Basic forms. This enables you to build a very rich user interface from all the functionality available in Visual Basic. Property pages are shown for the document types selected in the Configurator. There is no technical difference between property pages and wizard pages. A single Visual Basic form can be used for both, but they can also be different in layout or functionality. You select the Visual Basic forms that are to be used as property pages from the designer.

In order to use a Visual Basic form as a Meridian Enterprise property page, it needs to extend the IAMExtensionPage interface. This interface is used by Meridian Enterprise to control the information displayed on the form. Two template forms are installed with the developer components that contain a default extension of IAMExtensionPage, AM-Meridian PropertyPage, and AM-Meridian WizardPage. To complete the extension, you add your own code to extend the functionality of the page that you want, possibly including code to transfer property values from the vault to the page (and back) for properties that are not visible on the page (manual data binding).

Meridian Enterprise applications (such as the PowerUser) use a property sheet control to display the properties of documents and other objects. Each interface extension wizard page is shown as a tab page in the property sheet control.

Note    In spite of the power of Visual Basic forms for creating property and wizard pages, we recommend you use pages defined in Configurator whenever possible because the development cycle for Configurator pages is shorter and simpler. Of course, if Configurator pages do not meet your requirements, you are free to use interface extension pages. For more information on creating Configurator pages, see the Meridian Enterprise Configuration Guide.

Related information

About manual vs. automatic data binding

Creating a property page

Creating a wizard page