Ribbon

• Aug 01, 2019
• 4 minutes to read

Overview
The DevExpress WPF Ribbon Control is an Office-inspired component that replaces traditional toolbars and menus. Features such as galleries, a status bar, a specially designed ribbon window, a quick access toolbar, Aero window transparency, touch support and more allow you to fully replicate the user experience found in Microsoft Office.

Learn the Basics
This section contains multiple survey documents that familiarize you with Ribbon Control terms, and outline its major concepts and features. Overview Briefly explains major Ribbon Control capabilities and features, and enumerates all standalone controls that work together with the Ribbon Control to create the Office-inspired Ribbon UI. Getting Started Guides you through all stages of creating and customizing the Ribbon Control, starting with dropping it onto an application window to tuning individual items. Examples Contains various task-based examples.
Ribbon Structure
This section enumerates elements implemented by the Ribbon Control and its satellite components. Ribbon Control This document will introduce you to all regions and elements that typically make up the Ribbon UI. Page Categories and Contextual Pages Contains the overall information on Ribbon Categories - topmost objects that contain Ribbon Pages and affect their appearance. Pages Ribbon Pages are represented as tabs. End-users can click these tabs to view different commands, editors and galleries. Page Groups Each Ribbon Page can be structurally and visually split into multiple Page Groups. These groups are used to combine commands that have certain features in common. Quick Access Toolbar The Ribbon Quick Access Toolbar is a stripe above (or below) the Ribbon Control that is designed to provide end-users with one-click access to the most important and mostly used commands. Ribbon Status Bar An element that is typically drawn at the bottom of a window and displays status information, providing helpful feedback to end-users. Integration With a Window Window Controls provide a perfect integration with the Ribbon Control.
Items, Links and Galleries
Explains how to populate your Page Groups, status and Quick Access toolbars with various types of elements - push buttons, static text blocks, editors, drop-down menus, galleries, etc. Items and Links Ribbon Control shares the same ‘item - item link’ concept as traditional Bars. This document explains the difference between these types of objects. The List of Bar Items and Links Enumerates all elements with which you can populate your Ribbon. Ribbon Galleries Galleries display image lists within a Ribbon Control. Gallery items behave similarly to items in a regular menu: a click on a gallery item invokes a specific event, which you can handle to implement custom logic. For each gallery item, it’s also possible to provide text descriptions. In addition, galleries support hover images and tooltips.
Ribbon Menu
Microsoft Office products of different versions come with different types of main Ribbon menus that typically provide most significant application actions (e.g., creating a new document or printing your data). The DevExpress Ribbon Control allows you to emulate these main menu types with ease and elegance. Application Button A button, displayed at the top right corner of your window, that invokes the required main menu. Backstage View Emulates a menu seen in Microsoft Office products starting with Office 2010. Contains a main region that hosts regular commands and tabs, and a content region that displays the contents of the currently selected main region tab. Application Menu An older version of a Ribbon main menu, seen in Microsoft products prior to Office 2010.
Features
This section contains articles dedicated to individual Ribbon Control features. Ribbon Styles The Ribbon Control has multiple embedded styles that affect its appearance and behavior. Each style allows you to emulate the specific version of the Microsoft Office Suite. Depending on the current ribbon style, the Ribbon may gain or lose specific features. Key Tips Key Tips are hints that appear for all page headers and bar item links when an end-user presses the ALT or F10 key. Each hint displays an associated key that should be pressed to select the related element or execute a command assigned to it. Minimizing Ribbon Describes how to collapse a Ribbon Control, leaving only its Page headers visible. MDI Ribbon Merging The Ribbon Merging feature allows you to move categories, pages, page groups and items from the child MDI Ribbon to the main form. Runtime Customization The Ribbon Runtime Customization feature grants your end-users the ability to customize the Ribbon layout as their needs dictate and save/load these customized layouts to (from) an external storage. MVVM Support A document that illustrates how to build a Ribbon UI following the MVVM architectural pattern.