Customizing Dock Panels' Appearance
- 2 minutes to read
This topic provides information on customizing the appearance of dock panels. This includes information about specifying their painting style, captions and images, colors and fonts.
Painting Style
The ExpressDocking Library lets you use four predefined painting styles. These are the standard (Delphi-like), Visual Studio .NET style, Office 11 style and Windows XP style. To specify the desired style, use the docking manager’s LookAndFeel property. In this case, the painting style of dock controls depends on settings provided by the TcxLookAndFeelController component (if present). You can use this to provide a common look and feel for all Developer Express controls in your application.
Please refer to the Paint Styles topic for additional information and samples of painting styles.
Colors and Fonts
The color of dock panels is specified by their Color property. This color is applied to the panel’s client area and its child controls whose ParentColor property value is True. Note: it is not used when the XP or Office11 painting style is applied. A dock panel’s font is set using the Font property. The font is applied to the dock panel’s caption (when a panel is docked to a form) and to controls residing on that panel whose ParentFont property value is True.
The image below shows how to change a dock panel’s font style. Changes to Font settings are also applied to the panel’s child control since its ParentFont property value is True.
You can also provide a centralized control over the font and color settings of dock panels. The docking manager component provides its own Font and Color properties for this purpose. Note: settings supplied by the docking manager are only used by controls whose ManagerFont and ManagerColor properties are set to True.
Captions and Images
Captions and images are used to identify dock panels in your application. They are displayed within the following elements:
Dock panels’ headers;
Tabs representing dock panels joined within a tab container;
Labels representing dock panels with the auto hide feature enabled.
To specify a dock panel’s caption, use the Caption property. The image is set using the ImageIndex property. Note: an image list must be assigned to the docking manager’s Images property to provide the source of images displayed in dock panels.
The image below shows samples of images and captions.
