CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#wpftabcontrol
Amanduh
Amanduh

Reputation: 1243

Custom wpf tab control with one permanent tab, all other tabs scrollable

I need to create a control which has a single permanent tab ("home"), and all of the other tabs are scrollable.

Right now I am trying to achieve this result by subclassing the TabControl, adding an extra button (which looks like a tab) to the overridden template, and setting the SelectedIndex to -1 whenever the button is clicked. When SelectedIndex is -1, a trigger causes the TabControl's ContentControl to be bound to a special "Home" tab's content. Basically, I am faking the behavior of a real tab and overriding the ability to deselect all tabs in doing so.

This seems to work, except for two problems:

  1. Select example tab #3, then select home. THEN, try to select tab #3 again. Tab #3 doesn't respond.
  2. Select tab #3, then select home. THEN, try to use the menu which happens to be in the same window. When I go to use the menu, #3 pops up as the selected tab again.

I've tried to listen to all kinds of events associated with the TabControl at this point, but none of them seem to give me something I can work with to get around these behaviors.

Is there something out there that will allow me to override the default SelectedIndex behavior? Should I be doing this another way? Ideally, I would like some way to take in a collection of tabs that allows me split up the tabs visually without losing the basic functionality of a TabControl.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1109

Answers (2)

Amanduh
Amanduh

Reputation: 1243

I was able to implement this by writing my own custom tab panel, as AresAvatar suggested. However, the panel needed to extend from the ConceptualPanel implementation from http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/ConceptualChildren.aspx. The problem is that the panel needs to have IsItemsHost="true" in the TabControl template to preserve the tabs' selection behavior. Unfortunately, once a normal panel is an items host, it's Children can't be changed from inside it's own class code. So, I couldn't add the scroll buttons that I needed. I was able to get around that problem with the ConceptualPanel by adding everything (tabs + scroll buttons) via AddVisualChild.

There might be a better way to do this, but this worked for me.

Upvotes: 0

Ed Bayiates
Ed Bayiates

Reputation: 11220

The only way I can think of to accomplish this would be to use a custom ControlTemplate for the tab control. You can use StyleSnooper to get the current template. The that is part of that template would need to be replaced with a custom panel that you wrote. You base that on Panel. You would only need to override ArrangeOverride so that it arranged the Home tab in its place, and the others depending on the scroll position.

Upvotes: 1

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