Dock Controls Hierarchy
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When building a docking application using the ExpressDocking Library, you will make use of three kinds of controls:
- Dock Panels
These are the main building blocks of a docking application. They represent panels that serve as containers for other controls. Note that they cannot reside on forms as standard panel controls. Instead, they can only reside on sites (either floating or not). You can perform docking and resizing operations on dock panels in order to make them floating or docked. Also, you can dock them to one another to create containers.
- Sites
Sites are containers for dock controls. Dock sites are used to accommodate dock controls on forms (when they are non-floating). Note that you can only have floating dock controls if there are no dock sites on the form. Layout sites are automatically created when dock controls are docked to dock sites. They fill the dock site’s free space to provide advanced docking capabilities. Finally, float sites are used to accommodate dock controls on float forms.
- Containers
There are two different kinds of containers – tab containers and side containers. Both of these are capable of holding several other dock controls (dock panels or other containers). Tab containers display a single child control at a given time. End-users can switch between children using tabs. Side containers display their children all at once. Child controls are arranged one after another either vertically (if using the vertical side container) or horizontally (if using the horizontal side container). Note that you can perform docking operations on containers as well as on dock panels.
As you can see, these dock controls have common functionality. For instance, both sites and containers can own child dock controls. Docking operations can be performed on both containers and dock panels. All common functionality is implemented in the TdxCustomDockControl class, the common ancestor for dock controls.
The image below shows an inheritance diagram. You can click individual diagram items or click the corresponding links below to navigate to topics describing corresponding dock controls in detail.
