Rio and MDI Applications

[A.M. Hoornweg 144]

2 hours ago, eivindbakkestuen said:

You may want to test docking. You're not locked to docking the windows in particular places, they can float around on the "desktop" inside your application. You decide what kind of docking etc operations are applicable (perhaps you have a few child windows where it would be appropriate to only see one of them at a time, so would work in a tabbed child window, etc). I'm attaching an image of an application using the DevEx docking library; could just as well have been done with MDI.

 

This looks promising.

 

My current situation looks very much like this.  Users have many views and editors open simultaneously and entering data in one view can change the graphic output in another view:

 

 

 

 

Edited March 27, 2020 by A.M. Hoornweg

[Guest]

My next mega-desktop will be tabbed.

When i wrote the previous one, some 13 years ago, (still in production) i moved away from MDI.

In the beginning it was scary.

That application has a main form that allows for opening of all other forms. All other inherit from the same base.

The application encourages the user to use the windows taskbar functionality for arranging forms. Each form has an icon on the taskbar.

Since it's the same process the forms can and do interact. Of course, modal dialogs and on-top forms is a bit of a hazzle in that setup.

In my current project, i have opted to uses a tabbed interface where the tabs are placed on top of the client area. The client area is under a ribbon.

Why? Because of users. When i introduced the 13 yr old app (13 years ago) they were motly positive. Then after working away they were very happy for 5 years. The some trends changed and the new employees do not dirty their hands by learning anything that differs from Chrome or Office too much.

 

I find that MDI-ish/Floating is very nice for my own usage.

It is IMHO a lesser challenge to code for a tabbed UI.

However i agree with Arthur that multiple concurrent views has it's merits, definately.

 

HTH

 

 

[eivindbakkestuen 47]

Have a look at this which was just posted:

UberFrame panels