SandBar Container Bars

Home / Products / SandBar

Container bars are specially extended toolbars with a different layout engine, that allow controls to be safely hosted and designed within the confines of a SandBar toolbar. Although you can put any control in a container bar they are designed to offer the same look and feel as the Microsoft Office "Task Panes".

The best way to understand container bars is to think of them as ordinary toolbars with a slightly different look and layout. Differences in container bars are outlined below.

• A titlebar separate from toolbar buttons shows the toolbar text, as well as optionally a gripper, actions button and close button. The visibility of the buttons depends on context. The titlebar changes appearance to reflect when the container bar contains the focus.
• A "client area" where child controls are placed. This is actually another control designed specifically for this purpose and is added seamlessly by the designer when adding a container bar.
• Resize handles. Container bars have a thin margin where it is possible to drag the sides to increase or decrease the size of the bar, depending on which side of the toolbar layout system it is docked.
• The toolbar itself. This is relegated to a small area just underneath the titlebar and is drawn with a different appearance to normal toolbars. This is most noticable with the Office 2003 Renderer, shown on the right.

Container bars retain all the design-time functionality of normal toolbars. The toolbar itself, although just under the titlebar and drawn differently, allows the same selection and manipulation of its buttons. You can still click the actions button to add buttons.