Eclipse-like layout on Vaadin - vaadin

I'm looking to design a page with separate sections on Vaadin7.
Earlier, i was convinced that each section as a Panel would do-- see Vaadin menu design - which component at the top? on this.
Now, i need each of these sections be minimized/maximized at user's will. So - when the user clicks the minimize icon, that section will disappear (be minimized) until its maximize button is pressed.
The overall design will be much like Eclipse.
What's the best design for this?
I can use Vaadin Window-s for minimize/maximize. but then, how do i manage their automatic placement in the overall layout?
I want the sections be resizable with respect to one another, just as in Panel-s.
If i use HorizantalSplitPanel/VerticalSplitPanel-s, how do i manage minimize/maximize?
One thing i can think of is:
split the overall layout into Panel-s so that each section will be a
Panel,
put a Window in each panel,
when minimize is pressed, make
that window-minimize event also trigger to minimize the Panel that
Window is in shrink as well.
How to achieve this? Is there a better way?
TIA.

Related

Further customise a jQueryMobile custom select menu

Does anyone one know of a workaround/hack ;¬) to further customise jQuery custom select menu - i.e. when we've used
$(document).bind('mobileinit',function(){
$.mobile.selectmenu.prototype.options.nativeMenu = false;
});
to give us a nice list-item overlay in place of the standard listview page on selecting from a select menu.
The jQM docs here http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.2.1/docs/forms/selects/custom.html - state:
When it has too many options to show on the device's screen, the
framework will automatically create a new "page" populated with a
standard listview for the options. This allows us to use the native
scrolling included on the device for moving through a long list.
I would like to prevent this and always show the custom overlay; obviously the problem is scrolling the options which are out of view. When my project is switched to landscape thus decreasing the screen height it swithces to the 'old school', clunky listview. I should imagine its down to 'absolute' screen metrics since i can see the custom menu overlay will (just about) fit without reverting to the standard view.
The custom view is a much nicer looking interface, and more intuitive from a UI/UX perspective also.
Anyone know of any tricks to keep this behavior??

Icon in header row for column setup

I would like to add an icon to the header of my data grid as it is done in Thunderbird.
There is an icon that is above the vertical scrollbar, no matter the position of the horizontal scrollbar. This icon allows the setup of the columns.
In Delphi there a lot of different grid components, that allow customizations and adding icons to there cells / header cells. But I could not find any component that has an area above the vertical scrollbar that is fixed, which when clicked allows some action. I could even use the VirtualTreeView component to emulate the grid, if it turns out to be easier to customize that component.
I am looking for some guidance on what need to be done to get that functionality.
Thanks,
Thomas
VirtualTreeView in Listbox mode would be nice, because of it's speed, great documentation and ease use in MVC-like patterns. Delphi tempts to store data in the visual components themselves, which letter causes troubles. While VTW allwos the same, it also allows to acutally separate data from GUI, and i like it.
But i am surprised by your claim "which when clicked allows some action.".
Even most basic components allow it:
http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/XE2/en/Vcl.Grids.TCustomGrid.OnFixedCellClick
So could you make more detaiils, why you cannot use standard components ? with screenshot and editors, how u want it rendered, where you want to click and what kind of action should happen ?

Caption for TTabControl

I'm looking for a way of implementing a sort of inset caption before a set of tabs, something like this:
The tab set is not supposed to be multi-line, will only be horizontal and laid out at the top. However it should be correctly scrollable when there are too many tabs.
I fear I'm going to be restricted here with regard to using third-party controls, but I could use subclassing on the standard TTabControl to add the necessary changes to the standard looks and behaviour. (I don't need it to be TPageControl, because it's only the specific arrangement of the tabs that I am interested in.)
Maybe there's some way of implementing this with craftily arranged combination of standard controls, which, despite my endevours, has escaped me.
Basically, any ideas or pointers are welcome.
Oh, and additional requirement is, it should blend well with desktop themes.
Granted some time has passed, but I recently needed this style and found you can do it with the TMS Software TAdvOfficePager. It has a property FixedTabs, which I set to 1 in this case. It also has an OnChanging event where you can prevent access to a tab, in this case I used AllowChange := (ToPage > 0); Lastly, I set the first tab to disabled.
Then just style the first tab different than the rest and you can have something like this:
Have you tried to make the first tab to be the caption you want.
With some additional logic you can restrict the selection of this tab.
I don't know if you can control the style of each tab individually to make the first one look as it is not the tab.
Here is crafty arrangement of controls that will work. I have done this sort of thing in the past. Best of all it automatically handles scrolling of tabs.

Fluid Form Layout in Delphi

We have developed a software. In this software we are show and hiding a few controls on various input screens depending on various situations.
When we hid a control what happens is that the space occupied by that control is left as it is and layout looks very bad at times esp. in screens that have larger numbers of controls. Our client does not like this and has asked us to do something about this.
My question:
Is there some way by which we can create Fluid Layouts so that when a control is hidden the rest of the controls automatically adjusts themselves to fill the empty space left by the control hidden and when the control is show they should automatically make way for the control and adjust themselves accordingly.
I know we can achieve this by coding but that will require a lot of code in each screen for adjusting the layout. I am looking something which will reduce coding in each screen as there are 80+ screens.
Please suggest some way which is less error pron and can get rid of unnecessary coding in each input screen.
I think your best option is to use a component that handles the layout of your vcl controls on your form in runtime (depending on the conditions that you define). I recommend you try the Devexpress ExpressLayout Control
you can find two great demo videos here
ExpressLayout Control - How to Customize Layout Views
ExpressLayout Control - Create and Customize a Simple Layout
(source: devexpress.com)
You can check these features
Auto-Management - Control groups and individual control elements are automatically managed by the Layout Control. You never worry about pixel-by-pixel positioning.
Form auto-sizing - The form can be automatically resized to fit its contents best.
Bye.
Now, I'm not sure how complex layout you have, but I guess you can use TFlowPanel and/or TGridPanel for this. Flowpanel has a nice handling of components that change visiblity. I'm not sure how well gridpanel handles the same...
What kind of controls are you dynamically hiding, and what do you mean with auto fill space?
I do not know if it is as this simple: place controls on panels, and use align alTop/alClient/alBottom. When you hide a panel, all other panels will move automatically up.
One problem though: if you want to show a panel again, the order of panels can sometimes be screwed up... Can be fixed by manually setting .Top property, or "hide" by setting .Height := 1;
What I would do with a complex layout is actually split it up into several tabs. This has two advantages. It simplifies the form layout, and allows you to show and hide whole tabs depending on choices made in other tabs.
Raize Components have a TRzFlowPanel UI component. Does exactly what you're after.
Use TRzFlowPanel to put an empty flow panel on a form. The major difference between a traditional panel and a flow panel is the way in which controls are placed. With a traditional panel, you place a control (such as a button) in a specific location. You can freely move that control to any location within the panel using the mouse. In a flow panel, each control is placed in a specific location, regardless of where you place it with the mouse. The automatic location is controlled by the FlowStyle property. For example, using the default FlowStyle property of LeftRightTopBottom, the first control you add to the flow panel snaps to the top left corner. The second control that you add snaps next to the first control, and so on.

What design alternatives are there for nested page controls?

In our primary application, we have a form that will allow us to do cross tab analysis of data in four different ways. Presently, each analysis appears in its own page of a PageControl on the screen. Now, upper management would like us to add in a historical aspect to the form, which in other areas we would use a PageControl to do, but nesting two of them seems like a bad idea to display the periods and analyses tabs stacked on top of each other. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how we could re-work this to look decent and work well? Thanks.
What about using the TTabset control along the bottom of the form to allow switching between the historical periods and the current data? I would also make sure that there was a visual difference in how the data is presented for historical vs current data. Like use an off grey cell background for historical data.
Use an small (horizontal) TTabSet with a vertical one.
See here (you can click on the picture to zoom). The TTabSet is shipped OOTB with Delphi. The vertical one can be written very easily if your requirements are low. If you want, I can share the code. But if you want a better vertical tab set then you can spend more time on writing or get one which is ready made from Torry or somewhere else.
HTH.
IMHO, you can use frames for each analysis result page, then you can use either PageControl or TabSet or any other visual control for loading and showing the appropriate frame.
Since frames are totally independent from the visual control you use to select proper period and analysis, you won't be restricted to tab-based controls; for example you can have a tabset for analysis selection, and a treeview for period selection.
Frames have some additional benefits here too:
First of all, their code is kept in
separate units and this will increase
code readability.
Second, you can design a base frame
and put all the controls and codes
which all these 4 analysis share into
that base frame, and in this way have
a better code reuse.
Third, you can either drop each frame
on your main form and make them load
just like before, or you can define a
container control (e.g a panel), and
based on user's selection load one of
the frames into the container control
dynamically, so reduce initial load
time of your application, and
probably reduce the overall system
resource consumption.

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