Appearance Customization

Look and Feel Options

Multiple paint styles, including Windows theme support, numerous built-in skins, the ability to create custom skins and the ability to apply the selected paint style to all controls used in an application. These are just some of the reasons that illustrate that no other library available on the market today gives you as much as the XtraEditors Library. Create professional and visually consistent applications with the following look and feel customization options:

• Border style customization.
  Each control gives you 7 options for border style.
• Look and feel customization for editor buttons.
  At your discretion, you can apply a different paint style to buttons via the ButtonsStyle property (7 options to choose from).
• Look and feel customization for the dropdown window.
  Like editor buttons, dropdown windows can be assigned their own unique style. The PopupBorderStyle property offers 4 unique paint style alternatives.
• Additional built-in paint styles.
  The XtraTabControl gives you an additional PropertyView paint style emulating Visual Studio interface.

Appearance Options

Each and every control included into the XtraEditors Library allows you to customize the background and text appearance for all elements. Surely, the background style customization is only available if the applied paint style is not Windows native style or skin. But not only the ability to specify styles for each element is brought to you by our style customization mechanisms...

We bring you the style management simplicity, because we give you the advanced style inheritance for related settings. For instance, you can change the colors for an editor in focused and unfocused states individually. But if you want to make the same changes for both states, you only need to change the unfocused style. The same takes place with the text box and dropdown window styles for editors - you change only the text box's style to apply the same changes. The same takes places for the normal and hot-tracked states of tab headers - you can change only the style in the normal state. Thoughout the library, you get total flexibility and unltimate easy of use together.

The following points give some details on style customization and style inheritance facilities.

• Editors allow you to customize the style of their buttons, dropdown windows and the edit box in normal, focused and disabled states. By default, the disabled, focused and dropdown styles depend on the edit box style in unfocused state.
• The XtraTabControl allows you to customize the style for its pages and headers in normal, hot-tracked, pressed and disabled states. Each style can be applied either on the control's level or for each page individually. The hot-tracked, pressed and disabled header styles depend on the header style in normal state by default.

Style Controller

The StyleController component allows you to provide centralized appearance management for multiple controls. This means you don't have to apply the same colors and fonts for each and every editor individually to achieve visual consistency. If you want controls to have assume a common appearance - simply bind them to the same StyleController component. This component gives you all the appearance customization settings you might require - from paint styles to fonts and colors, from entire controls to their specific elements. The following settings are available when using our StyleController:

• Look and feel settings. (Multiple paint styles and skins.)
• Paint styles for control borders, editor buttons and dropdown windows.
• Appearance customization for controls in normal, disabled and focused states.
• Appearance customization for editor dropdown windows and dropdown headers.

Custom Painting

Both our look and feel and style management technologies give you a vast array of appearance customization options for individual controls. With custom painting, you can extend these customizations by painting specific items within dropdown lists, calendars, etc. The list below describes the items that can be custom painted within the XtraEditors Library.

• Date cells in the DateEdit control's dropdown window.
• Dropdown items in the ComboBoxEdit, ImageComboBoxEdit and MRUEdit controls.
• List items in the ListBoxControl, ImageListBoxControl and CheckedListBoxControl controls.
• Headers in GroupControl controls.