Design Views and Object Tree

Design Views are the primary development environment for your end user GUI interface. They are a close approximation of what the end user will see and use. The left pane of the design window shows a view of the class that is being worked on, and the right pane contains the Object tree. The Object tree enables you to quickly navigate to parent or child objects of the currently selected object. It provides access to visible objects such as controls, and to non-visible objects such as queries.

Open a design view for an info box class, dialog class or control class by dragging the class from the Windows Designer catalog onto the design area.

In a design view, you can for example:

•Select any visible control contained in the window simply by pointing at it.

•Navigate to parent controls by clicking whilst holding the ALT key down, or by using the Object tree.

•Switch the Selection Filter to Off to select low-level child controls.

•Open the Property Inspector for a selected object, and set or change object properties.

•Add or remove classes in the window. Use options from the Design menu.

•Run the window or dialog to test the effect of recent changes. Do this by choosing Design, Run from the menu bar.

In both the design view and the object tree, you can drag and drop, cut/copy and paste, and move controls from one position to another. You can move from the object tree to design view or vice versa during the drag and drop action, so a control selected in the object tree could be repositioned in the design view, for example.

You can also move or copy objects from a design view or object tree from one window, dialog or menu that is being designed to the design view or object tree of another window, dialog or menu.

Multiple selection of objects is also possible, by holding the control key down when selecting the required objects.