Child forms on a main form, any best practices ?

[Jean-pierre Leroy]

Dear all,

I have to write an application on which I would like to display "Child forms" on the same main form.

By example on my application I will have 4 choices:

• Issues
• Requests
• Projects
• Applications

I searched through the FireFly forum and examples, and I found two useful examples:

• the TabControl Demo that we got with FireFly
• a Multiple Dialog project that were available on this forum in the past.

So here are my questions ...

Q1. Which way is the simplest to create multiple forms dialogs on the main form ? with a Tab control or manually ?
Q2. What are the pros and cons for each solution i.e. with a Tab control or with manually managed child forms ?
Q3. Are there any design limitations in both cases ? in terms of numbers of control or controls that are compatible (or not) with both solutions ?
Q4. Are there any design rules available around (in books or website) that can give us the best practices to design Windows applications and more specifically multiple forms dialogs on the main form ?

Thanks for your help, I hope my questions are clear enough.
Jean-Pierre

[Wilko Verweij]

Hello Jean-Pierre,
Not sure to which question this is an answer, but an important difference between a tab control and 'manually created children' is that with a tab control you can view only one 'page' at a time, while in the other case you can see more pages simultaneously. If you use MDI, you even have very simple (one-line) code to tile, cascade, etc. but users can also manually adjust window sizes.
Wilko

[Jean-pierre Leroy]

Hello Wilko,

Thank you for your answer.

In fact in my case I would like the user to view only one 'page' at a time.
So unless there are some limitations, I think I will try the tab control.

Thanks for your input.
Jean-Pierre

[Jean-pierre Leroy]

Hello Paul,

I'm curious to know which kind of control did you use to create the "Search" form in FireFly ? is-it a TabControl ?

- Each time a tab is selected either "Find" or "Find in Files", the title is in bold; can you tell me how to do that ?
- The style of the tab itself seems to be different from the standard TabControl; can you tell me how to do that ?

Thanks,
Jean-Pierre

[Rolf Brandt]

Hi Jean-Pierre,

I had asked for that a while ago. You can find Paul's answer in this thread:

http://www.planetsquires.com/protect/forum/index.php?topic=2209.msg17442#msg17442

I hope Paul still has it on his ToDo list.

[Jean-pierre Leroy]

Hi Paul,

Do you plan to release this control in with FF3 in the future ?

Thanks,
Jean-Pierre

[Paul Squires]

Hi Jean-Pierre,

I can share the control with you guys. Just email me privately and I will see if I can get the source code together so it can be used in your projects. It won't be a FireFly custom control that shows in the ToolBox but you may be able to integrate it standalone or via the CustomControl control.