Customizing ArcPad toolbars

ArcPad's default toolbars can be used as they are supplied out of the box, or can be customized. There are three ways you can customize toolbars:

• Modify the look and feel of the default toolbars: ArcPad’s default toolbars present a rich set of commands, organized by functionality into the Main, Browse, and Edit (or Draw) toolbars. Within ArcPad itself you can create a Favorites Toolbar (use the Favorites tab on the ArcPad Options dialog) to choose your favorite tools to display on a single toolbar. In ArcPad you can also alter the visibility of toolbars, either to show/hide, minimise or dock them on another part of the screen.
• Create custom toolbars consisting of only built-in commands: If your mobile GIS application only requires a subset of the commands offered in the default toolbars, or requires them presented in a different arrangement, you can modify the exisiting toolbars and / or create your own. You can do this using the ArcPad Toolbar Manager or ArcPad Studio. ArcPad also has a Command bar used for editing tasks. It cannot be customized.
• Create user-defined commands: In some cases, ArcPad’s built-in commands may not provide the functionality you need, or you may want to automate tasks and group several actions into one command. Advanced toolbar commands are created in scripts (using VBScript or JScript) and linking them to the events of user-defined commands—for example, the OnClick event. When the user interacts with a user-defined command, the associated scripts are executed. You will need ArcPad Studio to make these custom toolbars.

You can create custom toolbars that work only within a specific applet or via the default configuration file so that they are always loaded when ArcPad starts. These new toolbars can contain a combination of built-in tools, that are found on ArcPad’s default toolbars, and user-defined commands, that call custom scripts. You can hide or display any of the built-in toolbars and specify that toolbars include large format buttons.

Toolbars are loaded into ArcPad as follows: on startup, ArcPad loads any custom toolbars from the default configuration file (ArcPad.apx). As each applet is loaded, its toolbars are then added to the system.