Screen Tips

Actipro Ribbon fully implements screen tips for controls, which are advanced variations of standard tooltips. They not only display a normal tooltip header but also can contain shortcut keys, an image, and a longer description explaining more about what the control does or its current state.

Several varieties of screen tips

Screen tips are displayed in three ways depending on the content that is available. If only a label/header is availble, the screen tip will display as a standard tooltip. If an image is available (generally representing a thumbnail screenshot of a dialog or preview of the action that takes place when the control's command is executed), a larger screen tip is used. If a description of the control is available it also uses a larger style screen tip, although it will not be as wide as if an image is used. Note that images and descriptions can both be used in a screen tip at the same time. Large screen tips display the label/tooltip header in bold.

General Implementation

All ribbon controls have several properties for configuring screen tips: ScreenTipHeader, ScreenTipImageSource, ScreenTipDescription, ScreenTipFooter, and ScreenTipHelpUri.

These properties are all implementations of the ScreenTipService attached properties described in greater detail in the ScreenTipService section below.

This code sample shows how to set a screen tip description for a Button. When the screen tip is displayed, the button's Label will be used as the bold header (since no ScreenTipHeader was specified) and the description will appear under the header.

<ribbon:Button Label="Bold" ScreenTipDescription="Toggles the bold state of the text." />

Ribbon control also have the ScreenTipOpening and ScreenTipClosing events that can be used to programmatically generate screen tip content.

ScreenTipService

The ScreenTipService provides numerous attached properties and events for working with screen tips and manages screen tip display and behavior.

It has these important properties:

Most of the screen tip content properties are of type object, allowing you to pass a string of text or any control. This allows for great flexibility in what you can display on the screen tip.

Use Screen Tips on Anything

Yes that's right. Our implementation of screen tips is so flexible that you can even assign them to non-ribbon controls!

Simply assign the appropriate ScreenTipService attached properties to the controls that should have screen tips.

This code sample shows how to set a screen tip header and description for a native WPF Button:

<Button Text="Regular Button" 
	ribbon:ScreenTipService.ScreenTipHeader="Regular Button."
	ribbon:ScreenTipService.ScreenTipDescription="This is a native WPF Button."/>

Dynamically Generating Screen Tip Content

Screen tip content can be dynamically generated. This allows you to modify the screen tip data on demand to best reflect the current state of the control.

To do this, process the ScreenTipOpening event for the desired control. That event is raised before a screen tip is about to display for a control. In the event handler, you may change any screen tip properties before they are rendered to the end user.

Note that at least one screentip-related attached property, such as ScreenTipService.ScreenTipHeader must be set on the desired target object for the event to be raised.

Context Sensitive Help Implementation

Whenever the ScreenTipHelpUri property is set to a non-null value, a help icon and text will appear near the bottom of the screen tip that indicates that the user may press F1 to access context sensitive help for that control.

To handle this, simply process an Execute handler for the standard ApplicationCommands.Help command. Then in that code, check the CurrentScreenTip property to see if there is a ScreenTip currently visible. If there is, and a help URI is specified, show the appropriate topic in your help file.

This is demonstrated in the screen tip QuickStart in the sample project.