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Designer

  • 2 minutes to read

With the DocumentManager Designer you can create and customize main application elements and concatenate them into a single application tree without hassles. To open a Designer, click the DocumentManager‘s ‘Run Designer’ smart tag.

Document Manager - BarMerging - Designer

The figure below illustrates the designer’s interface.

DocumentManager - Designer Main Window (WinUI)

The following sections are available.

  • Main

    In this section, you can create and select views. You can also specify WindowsUIView properties using the property grid.

  • Elements

    Contains three sub-sections: Documents, Tiles and Content Containers.

    • Documents are objects that wrap controls. Click the ‘Add New Document’ button to create an empty Document. To set its content, handle the BaseView.QueryControl event (see the Deferred Load topic to learn more). The ‘Populate’ button adds a document for each User Control found in your solution. Refer to the Documents article to learn more about Documents and ways to populate them.
    • For each Document created in the ‘Documents’ section, a corresponding Tile is generated automatically. In this sub-section, you can modify and remove existing or add new tiles.
    • Content Containers are objects that host Documents and tiles. Automatically generated tiles for each Document are placed into the TileContainer. In this sub-section, you can remove this container and/or add the new ones.
  • Layout

    The ‘Navigation Tree’ sub-section of this page allows you to build the application hierarchy (see the Application Hierarchy and Module Navigation topic to learn more). The ‘Layout’ sub-section provides the capability to save or import a layout version to (from) a local storage.

  • Appearance

    Contains appearance settings for WindowsUIView application elements (navigation bars, splash screens, etc). The central page area is a preview section that reflects the current appearance settings. Right-click this preview to display Navigation Bars with a button sample within.