Next Gen Visual Designer front end -testing

[Jules Marchildon]

Thanks for testing and the valuable tip Börje!    

Regarding the Tab control when the scroller is activated, that white strip is the original white background that my custom drawing is not handling at the moment, my slip up.  For now, I'll enforce a minimum width based on the tabs themselves. And in test mode I use the same custom drawing, only the design grid part is switched off, so the page is painted the same way in both modes. When I get to the code generation part it will not use my custom drawing so it will behave normally.

There are a few other issues I have to address like when nesting Tab controls, it doesn't behave well, and my Sticky Groupbox can steal controls from a tab (if they are within it's bound rules) when dragging over it.  I'll keep banging my head trying working out the logic to fix it. 

Some more progress, I managed to add the Statusbar and Toolbar controls to the tool palette and attache them to a Form.

   

[Walt Decker]

Works quite well. However, when clicking outside of control the place holder for control properties pops up. Perhaps a message about outlining controls to move should be in its place.

About the tab control. One of the things I am working on is a method to add controls to the individual pages. That is tricky.

[Jules Marchildon]

Hey Walt, Thanks for testing it out.

Double clicking on the client (open space) should bring up my placeholder dialog for the Forms Properties, while double clicking on a control brings up the placeholder dialog for the Control Properties. You can also right click on the Form or Control for the context menu.  This designer includes the ability to select a tab and place controls on them.  And yes I find it extremely tricky and I'm way over my head at this point, but in this version I have started it... you didn't notice you can do that?  I guess it's not as intuitive as I thought - Ops!    The next version will not allow nested Tab controls. 

I know from experience creating QTAB (Quick Visual Tab Designer) back in 2003, the longest part of that journey was coding the properties dialog.  QTAB allows you to draw directly on the tab control incase you never heard of it. It was done with PBWIN7, I have not updated it to PBWIN10 and probably wont since I'm working on this new one.   Here is a link to the source code and the binary located in the release zip.
https://web.archive.org/web/201205142148.../QTab2.zip

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Updated the test binary, you can now add one Toolbar and Statusbar control per form. The tab control min width is enforced until I can figure out how to add the extra custom paint handler for the client area when the arrow buttons are activated (see Börje attached image).


  dmsEngine.zip (Size: 104.46 KB / Downloads: 3)

[Walt Decker]

I had Qtab from years ago but never looked at it. Just finished looking at the Qtab zip you posted. Lot of interesting stuff in there. Thank you.

[Jules Marchildon]

I've translated the Win32 SDK C property grid control by David MacDermot to PowerBASIC. It imitates the Visual Studio property grid.  *Once the right side (the value) is active, the arrow keys belong to that value’s editor, not to the list. You can use your mouse  or keyboard to navigate.

The full keyboard cycle works like this...
-arrows to choose a property,
-Tab to edit it,
-then Enter or Esc to return to the left side.

PB Compiled binary attached if you want to try it out.