Toolbar, Menu and Status Bar Systems

With the XtraBars Suite you can easily emulate toolbar/menu systems like those found in Microsoft Office 2003 (or earlier). By dropping a BarManager component onto a form, you can create a main menu, a status bar and a single toolbar. You can then easily add any number of toolbars and populate the bar and menu with buttons, check boxes, editors, etc.

Standalone Toolbars

You can place toolbars at any location within a form.

Various Toolbar Layouts

Toolbars produced by the XtraBars Suite support a wide number of layouts which depend upon their position, dock edge, size of neighboring bars and various other conditions. Below is a list describing these layouts:

• A toolbar's orientation changes to vertical when it is docked to the left or right container's edge. You can specify whether toolbar items should also be rotated together with the bar using the bar's RotateWhenVertical option;
• Editor items cannot be rotated together with the toolbar so the XtraBars Suite allows you to substitute such items with buttons when a bar is vertically oriented. These buttons are designed to invoke dialogs which provide the same functionality as the editor;
• If a bar's UseWholeRow option is enabled, the bar is stretched to fit the container's edge and no other toolbar can reside on the same row;
• Bars can occupy several rows provided that their MultiLine option is enabled and there is not enough space to populate all items onto a single row;
• If a bar's MultiLine option is disabled and it is too small to contain all its items, the trimmed items are displayed within an overflow panel that can be invoked using the button located after the last visible item.

Menu Animation Support

With XtraBars you can apply various animation effects to sub menus and context menus. The available effects include:

• Slide;
• Fade;
• Unfold;
• Random effect;
• The animation effect specified by the system settings.

Most Recently Used Items

When building main menus with XtraBars, you get an extremely flexible approach to using the most recently used items feature:

• Use the BarAndDockingController's MostRecentlyUsedPercent property to specify how soon an item moves to the most recently used list;
• Specify which items should appear as the most recently used via the item context menu.

In addition to these features, your end-users can customize the behavior of most recently used items via the Options tab in the Customization window - just like in Microsoft Office.