mdi taskbar and desktop

[jksmith]

That extjs example is pretty snappy. Is this currently doable with SmartClient?

[Isomorphic]

That's pretty trivial.

A good starting point might be the portlet animation example, accessible from the SDK start page under Examples -> Animation -> Portlet Animation. This example is much more sophisticated, as it uses Layout Managers and drag and drop reorder animation, but it shows the general idea for creating and animating Windows to and from a dock.

[jksmith]

Thanks for the example. You guys have the sophistication in the framework I can see from that example. I'll just need to write some window manager code.

[SchlauKunde]

I assume that this thread is about the neat UI pattern "Docking Windows"; are "Docking Windows" easy to implement in SmartClient ?

[Isomorphic]

There are a few different things called "docking windows".

The Portlet Animation example shows Windows minimizing to and from a ListGrid. This is similar to the Windows "Start Bar" and is easy to implement.

In Internet Explorer, Office and other Microsoft apps, toolbars can be rearranged, dragged out as floating palettes, and later re-docked. This is also fairly easy - docked toolbars can be arranged in a Layout, and the docked toolbar should have a "drag handle" (generally a bumpy-looking area that suggests dragging) and as drag begins, should be removed from the Layout and added to a Window instead so it appears as a floating palette. To re-dock, set layout.canDropComponents to create a dropping interaction on the Layout.

There are nuances to some of these docking interactions, like live display of the toolbar as its being docked (I personally hate this :), and like the fact that controls in a toolbar hide in a specific order as you resize it smaller according to how often they are used. These nuances would require moderately sophisticated custom component development.