VDA Utilities are a set of high-level convenience routines that developers can use to quickly develop and modify the user interface of a VDA Tool. These routines are written in PV‑WAVE and are located in:

Where <wavedir> is the main PV-WAVE directory.

VDA Utilities all begin with the prefix “Wo”.

The VDA Utilities layer allows the application developer to establish a consistent and native application look and feel, have readily portable code, and take advantage of inherent international support, while retaining some flexibility in terms of user interface design.

The calls to VDA Utilities are the same on all platforms: applications based on VDA Utilities for their user interface are immediately portable among all supported UNIX and Windows platforms.

VDA Utilities take advantage of PV‑WAVE string and resource database facilities, which allow you to adapt your applications easily to different languages.

Finally, VDA Utilities offer user interface flexibility. You can easily add new menu items and functions to the standard menu and button bar utilities.

Three important VDA Utilities are:

These three VDA Utilities are used to create the menus, buttons, and message area in the graphical VDA Tools—WzPlot, WzImage, WzContour, and WzSurface.