Creating menu data files accelerates access to menus especially in multi-level client-server architectures, because menu definitions are no longer directly read from the database (DB-server), but from a data file of the application (application-server). However, you should only create a menu data file after you have defined all menus required for your application.
You create a menu data file for all menus of the application by selecting all menu records in the Menu Data form and executing the function Create Dump.
For any changes you make to menu definitions after creating the data file, the following dependencies should be considered.
All changes to menu definitions (menu attributes, item assignments) which you make in the DataView system masks are stored in the database by DataView. However, the information required for creating menus on the user interface are read from the data file first. DataView will only read this information directly from the database if no data file exists. The function Reconfigure will not be successful after a change if a data file already exists. If this is the case, you will first have to overwrite the old definitions in the data file with the new ones from the database. This is done with the function Create Dump. After that you can copy the menus into main memory via Reconfigure and the changes will be visible on the user interface.