UI Docking Panels Overview

In This Topic

Nevron User Interface 4.0 introduces a powerful docking library which provides your applications with the latest GUI standards and technologies. These are interface structured hierarchies of predefined controls that can be docked, floated or redocked using visual feedback at run-time. The unique tree-based layout system allows for practically any complex structure to be achieved in a few lines of code. The dock manager uses advanced logic for getting a valid dock area and overcomes limitations of the standard docking behaviour experienced in other products.

The docking framework is extremely flexible and feature rich. By default all UI elements are rendered by a common renderer, all layout operations are performed by a common layout engine, drag events are handled by a common drag handler, etc. All of these objects can be replaced with your own custom ones either at the manager's level or per docking panel instance.

Basic Concepts

Nevron docking panels have two main type controls - docking panel and docking panel container. The design is pretty simple - a container hosts docking panels. Panels themselves are hosted by dock zones which are tree-based objects allowing for extreme flexibility and complexity regarding layout.

The following diagram represents the interface model of docking panels and dock zones:

Appearance Features

Rendering:

Consistency - based on the core UI render logic docking panels provide consistent appearance based on pluggable renderers and palettes.
Speed - our rendering system uses advanced and complex logic to determine invalid areas and repaints them without drawing over a single pixel two or more times.
Custom floating frames - the floating frames provided by the framework are entirely custom and with fully customizable appearance.
Fully customizable captions - docking panels captions can be easily customized and extended.
Fully customizable tabs - dock manager provides full control over tabs appearance.

Caption Style:

Font - specify the font to be used when rendering caption text.
GripperStyle - specify the appearance of caption gripper.
GripperVisibility - specify whether captions will display a gripper.
Height - specify your preferred caption height.
Caption appearance - depending on the current ColorScheme captions are drawn in different ways.

Tab Style:

Tabs in Nevron docking panels are extremely rich regarding appearance and visualization.

TabStyle - specify the appearance of tabs.
TabAlign - specify how tabs are aligned.
TextOrientation - specify orientation of text on tabs.
Font - specify the font to be used when drawing text on tabs.

Splitter Style:

Nevron docking panels are freely resizable within their container via splitters.

GripperStyle - specify the style to be used when rendering a splitter gripper.
Size - specify the width (height) of a splitter.
HasGrippers - specify whether a gripper will be drawn on a splitter.