Bar Manager
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A bar manager is a non-visual component that maintains bars, bar items, categories and item groups within a container (form or frame). To place a bar manager on a form or frame, drop a TdxBarManager component from the component palette’s ExpressBars page onto the form/frame. Place only one bar manager component per form/frame.
Customization Capabilities
After you place a TdxBarManager component onto a form, you can invoke the Customization Form and create bars and the main menu using the bar manager’s context menu. Note that you can also invoke the Customization Form by double-clicking the TdxBarManager component.
At design time, a bar manager’s Customization Form allows you to manage bars, bar items, categories, and item groups, and also specify options that are common to all bar items. Refer to the Customization Form topic to learn more about the capabilities provided by this form.
To manage bars, bar items, categories, and item groups in code, use a bar manager’s Bars, Items, Categories, and Groups collections, respectively.
In addition to traditional toolbar/menu systems, the ExpressBars Suite allows you to arrange bar items using the modern Ribbon User Interface.
Appearance Settings
A bar manager allows you to apply a paint style to all its bars via the Style and LookAndFeel properties.
Note
You can use the TcxLookAndFeelController component to maintain the same look and feel settings across all controls (including bars) on your form(s).
Using a bar manager’s Font property, you can specify font settings common to all bar items. You can customize appearance settings (background color or bitmap, font settings and text color) for each bar item using its Style property. In addition, you can use the StyleEdit property to customize appearance aspects of in-place editors.
Layout Persistence
The ExpressBars Suite allows the layout of bars to be saved and restored in the system registry, an INI file or stream. Refer to the Saving and Restoring Bar Layout topic for detailed information about automatic and manual layout persistence.