Physical Widgets

Physical widgets determine what objects look like in presentation components. They determine the properties used to style the object and influence its behavior in response to user interactions.

Physical widgets are implemented using the underlying technology of the component, so they dictate the capabilities of the widget. Widgets in Form components are implemented in Windows, and therefore support different properties and capabilities than widgets in server pages, which are implemented using HTML.

All objects in the user interface have an associated widget, often built-in, but the term physical widget is most commonly used for widgets that are addressed by named configurations called logical widgets, and most of these are field-level widgets. For more information, see Logical Widgets.

In desktop applications, there are physical widgets available for entities (udefentity and egrid), area frames (uframe), application shells (ushell), menus (umenu), and panels (upanel). Except for area frames, for which you can define multiple logical widgets, these widgets support only one logical widget definition. For more information, see Setting Properties in Initialization Files.