Styling a Document like a ToolWindow

Hi Gareth,

Have you tried using like a maximized standard MDI window setup, or tool window inner fill?  Would either of those suit your needs?

Do you have a screenshot showing what you'd ideally like everything to look like?  The screenshot would definitely be helpful.  Feel free to post a link to one here or you could email it to our support address if you'd prefer to keep it private.

From the Converting to 2016.1 topic, I think this is probably the feature you were referring to that was removed:

SingleTabLayoutBehavior.Stretch Option Removed - The SingleTabLayoutBehavior.Stretch option has been removed. If a similar feature is added in the future, it would be to force all tabs to fill up to the available space instead of just a single tab.

The reason we removed it was that it was odd to have a single tab fill the space and then if two tabs came in, it would suddenly not fill the space.  If we added an option to fill tabs up the available space, how would you like to see that work?

The standard MDI setup won't work for us as we are committed to the bew docking style for various political reasons.

ToolWindow inner fill does go someway to achieving what we want BUT when we are more than 2 toolwindows they start to tab within themselves. We do not want this inner tabbling behavior as each toolwindow title contains context and actions for its content. When tool windows tab within a container toolwindow the context on the container becomes confusing as we cannot tell what tab it belongs to. Is there a way to stop the tabbing behavior within a tool window? Although we are happy to keep this behavior in the toolwindows that attach to a dockside for auto-hiding.

Here's a link to an image to explain what we are trying to achieve.

http://www.parris.me.uk/i/actipro.png

That is using tool window inner fill and it does almost achieve what we need. We only have two issues:

1) How do we stop an inner-fill tool window being tabbed. We need be able to restrict specific toolwindow containers to have only 1 toolwindow. Is this possible?

You can see that the right hand side docking tool window does have tabs too. We do want to keep this behavior. We just want to disable it for the inner fill windows.

2) How do we set an icon on the inner-fill tool windows so that it appears to the left of the Title text? I know we can use the customisable toolbar header contents but it does not allow us to set anything to the left of the title.

Here's hoping you can help us!

Thanks,

Gareth.

Hi Gareth,

A main question I'd have is that if you didn't show tabstrips, how would you switch between the various windows in the same container?  But per your last post, it seems like you might never want them attachable at all?  If so, you can set DockSite.CanToolWindowsAttach = false.  If you are using a nested DockSite (it looks like you might be), set it on the nested one.  Otherwise, you'd have to set CanAttach = false on each ToolWindow that should have that kind of restriction.

You would also need to retemplate ToolWindowContainer to add the image into the title bar since one doesn't exist in the template right now.  You could use contextual content to show images or status indicators in the title bar without retemplating, but as you saw, they appear on the right next to the title bar buttons.  There's no option to show that content on the left instead, but we could look into adding something (like a ToolWindowTitleContextualContentLocation enum) if that would be helpful to you.

Ok, for some reason the CanAttach property has passed me by! I've changed our inner nested docksite to set CanToolWindowsAttach="False" and I've also set all the inner tool-windows property <Setter Property="CanAttach" Value="False"/>. 

Now when I add several windows, the first two add as I expect. The third becomes a tab within the second, and same for the rest, they all still become tabs in the second window.

However, now when I drag each tab out of the container it no longer can attach to another one. So it partially works.

How can I stop that initial tabbing?

As for the contextual content, we have a working implemetation using that method you suggest but we really need it to be left aligned before the title. If you are able to add an enum to relocate it that would be brilliant!

Thanks,

Gareth.

Hi Gareth,

Our next maintenance release will not trigger the tabbing when setting IsOpen=true if the CanAttachResolved property is false.

Also we are adding a DockSite.ToolWindowsTitleBarContextContentAlignment property that you can set to indicate if you want the context content left or right of the title.

I can confirm that all now works! Thank you.