Eyefinder Tutorial

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This tutorial is a quickstart guide to getting Eyefinder installed on your form and working.

Configuring the Control

Assuming you have already added the Eyefinder NavigationBar control to your toolbox, drop an instance of it on to your form. The control has its Dock set to Left by default so it will snap to the left-hand side of your form. You can always change its dock style via the propertygrid.

When there are no navigation panes present, the control shows only the footer and resizing gripper, and an empty client area. The header is only displayed when there is a selected navigation pane.

You will notice a hyperlink displayed in the PropertyGrid when the control is selected, entitled "Add Navigation Pane". This is how you add child navigation panes to the navigation bar. Click it a few times now, to add some panes. You will see buttons being added to represent the panes, and the control header will appear.

To change the selected navigation pane, click on its button. The button will show highlighted, and the client area of the navigation bar will show a selection rectangle indicating it is ready to receive child controls. Also, you can change the appearance of the selected pane in the PropertyGrid. Try changing the Text property of the panes you added, one by one.

As well as the standard Text property, navigation panes have LargeImage and SmallImage properties. The standard size for large images displayed on buttons in this control is 24x24 pixels, but any reasonable size of image is supported. Try assigning images to the LargeImage property of each of the panes you have just added. You will notice that the height of the panes changes to reflect the largest loaded image.

Now it's time to populate the control with some child controls. Select the navigation pane you wish to populate, then drop a control in to the client area at the top of the navigation bar. You would typically use one list control, such as a ListView or TreeView, set its Dock to Fill and BorderStyle to none. As you flip through the navigation panes you can populate them with different child controls.

Common Extra Features

SelectedPage Property - Gets/sets the pane that is currently selected within the control. Note that this property could be a null reference (Nothing in Visual Basic) if there is no pane selected.

SelectedPaneChanged Event - There may be occasions when you want to know when the selected pane is changed. This event fires whenever this happens, and you then check the SelectedPane property to see which is the new selected pane.

ShowPanes Property - Gets/sets how many panes are shown in the main area of the control. This must be an integer between zero and the total number of visible panes in the control.

Listed Property - (On NavigationPane) controls whether the pane is listed in the normal panes list in the control. If it is not, it will be available within the menu that pops up when the chevron/actions button is clicked. Users can then toggle this property themselves via that menu.