I would like to develop a hierarchical menu in assembler, that can be navigated by means of push-buttons.

After browsing around on the internet, gathering information and thinking about the issues, I found that navigating menus was pretty much like navigating a file-structure. So I concluded that what was needed, in order to be flexible and re-usable, was a unix inode-like structure (file-system structure) whereby the inodes (read menu-items) are pointers, either to other lists of inodes, or pointers to an action (subroutine) that needs to be performed. In order to navigate, 4 pushbuttons (or navigation commands) are needed. These buttons would be:

Enter: run command or select submenu

Escape: go to higher-level menu

Up: scroll up in menu-list

Down: scroll down in menu-list

So, besides a generic routine used to navigate the menu-structure, all that one needs to do is build some linked lists of inodes in memory, and a complete menu-structure can be implemented in a short time.


Has anybody developped something similar? Are my assumptions right or is this overkill for an embedded system? Are there better ways of doing this? Is anyone interested in the outcome of my trials?

Any remarks, hints, warnings are more than welcome...

Regards
Patrick De Groote