I am making a new graphical menu interface for a project I am making. I don’t want to use the menu system provided by windows APIs and want to make one from scratch.
My question is, what is the best method for setting up the structure?
I’m thinking I will need a menu item object, each of which will have to have their own item array list, etc…
Is it considered sloppy to have recursive coding like that? (Ie an object which contains objects of itself, which contains objects of itself, etc…)
I’m thinking I can give the item object a draw interface which checks itself to see if it has an item array that is not null. If it does, it executes the draw command all the way down, thereby giving me a menu with (for my purposes) unlimited submenu level
In my opinion your approach is fine. In nearly all UI frameworks, views contain views as subviews after all.
But the thing is that writing drawing code is too much work for small projects I think. I would consider using a UI framework such as QT and use its view mechanism as a starting point. You can write your own Menu class which will be a subclass of generic View class in the framework.