Im having trouble adding a menuitem to the mainscreen menu
 

Im having difficulty adding a Menuitem to the main screen. Adding the other fields has been no problem. here is the code. Imports are included.

import net.rim.device.api.ui.*;
import net.rim.device.api.ui.MenuItem;
import net.rim.device.api.ui.component.*;
import net.rim.device.api.ui.container.*;
import net.rim.device.api.system.*;

....

MenuItem men = new MenuItem("new item",40,40) {
public void run() {
// title.setText("text here");
}

};
add(men);


the error I get is:
C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry JDE 4.3.0\bin\HelloWorldtest.java:137: cannot find symbol
symbol : method add(net.rim.device.api.ui.MenuItem)

You don't add a menu item to your screen. You add a menu item to your menu. Look at overriding makeMenu() in the Screen class.

you can also use public void addMenuItem(MenuItem item) if you are not overriding makeMenu()

Thank you.
Switching to addMenuItem worked.

Is it a better idea to override MakeMenu?

it depends...
if the menu items should be added "dynamicaly" (or the labels changed) depending on some state of the screen it is better to override makeMenu()

thank you. I have not tried overiding MakeMenu yet, but I understand that to dynamically adding menuitems would best be done that way. I have found that I can change labels though the other way as well, as long as I declare the menuitems to be within the mainscreen class.