Category
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The ExpressBars Suite allows you to organize bar items into logical groups, using ‘category‘ and ‘item group‘ metaphors. A category is a collection of items and each item can belong to only one category. Categories are designed only to provide organized access to bar items via the Customization Form.
Unlike item groups, categories can be displayed in the Customization Form at runtime. Refer to the Customization Form - Commands Page topic to learn more.
The following options allow you to control the visibility of categories and their items within the Customization Form at runtime:
In code, with a bar manager’s CategoryVisible and CategoryItemsVisible indexed collections.
At design time, using the popup menus that appear when clicking the “…modify“ buttons in the Commands Page in the Customization Form. Refer to the Customization Form - Category Modify and Customization Form - Item Modify topics for more information on these popup menus.
You can create any number of categories using a bar manager’s Categories zero-based indexed collection. Each category in this collection is a string that indicates the category’s name. At design time, this collection provides a standard editor to manage its contents.
When a bar manager is created, it already contains a category with the default name. When the last category is programmatically removed from a bar manager’s Categories collection, the default category is recreated automatically.
To assign a category to a bar item, use the item’s Category property.
To retrieve bar items based upon their category, visible state, and position within a category, use a bar manager’s GetAllItemsByCategory, GetItemsByCategory, and GetItemByCategory methods.