How to reserve some space on the right of the ribbon?

[swautier]

Hi,

My app drives some piece of hardware. We want to display a small Hardware connection status panel in the top right corner of the app. But I also want to use a ribbon, which means this panel would be displayed on the right of the ribbon. Is there any way to do this? Or does the ribbon always use the full width of the window?

To give you a more accurate idea, this info panel would look something like this:
3 right-aligned lines each ending with a small green or red LED-like indicator featured as [x] below:

Camera 1 [x]
Camera 2 [x]
Accel [x]

TIA for your lights,

Serge.

[Chris Porter]

Why not put the status window in the Ribbon? You can drop in custom controls that do pretty much anything and should easily be able to render colored icons based on data from another source.

[swautier]

Chris, thanks for your reply.

I thought of that but I see 2 problems:

1 (minor). Can I make sure that this group won't be shrinked is user narrows the window (e.g. up to displaying the leds only but not the labels). Not much of a problem though since the main form will most likely be fixed size.

2 (more important). Even if I add this group to each tab of the ribon to make sure it's always displayed, I can't be sure it will always be displayed on the right end side of the form: If the contents of a tab doesn't fill the whole width space, my status group will move.

Or can I right-align a ribon group?

TIA,
Serge.

[shartmann]

Hi,

I'm having the same problem as swautier,
I like to add an activity indicator like in firebird (the rotating circle) and I think this doesn't look good inside the tab pages.
It would be nice if the ribbon would have an optional "free (outside) area" on the right, where we can add own controls, logos etc.

best regards
Stephan

[Phil Wright]

You can pretty much get what you want and with a little extra coding but with one restriction. Use the following process...

1, Create a new Form
2, Set KryptonForm as the base class
3, Drop a KryptonPanel onto the client area
4, Set the Dock=Right for the KryptonPanel
5, Drop a KryptonRibbon on the client area.

Now you have the situation you require as the ribbon will only extend to the right until it meets the docked panel on the right hand side. There is an issue with this when using Vista. Under Vista when you have custom chrome and the ribbon it reverts to showing using the glassy borders. This does not work when you have the panel docked on the right as you will notice the panel uptends up and into the top border! To get around this set the AllowFormIntegrate property on the KryptonRibbon to False. Now it works fine but you are stuck with the Office 2007 custom chrome under Vista. This custom border is the restriction I mentioned.

The only remaining issue is that the docked panel on the right extends all the way down to the bottom of the client area. So when you add your control for taking up the remainder of the client area it does not extend to the right edge in the way I assume you would like. The only way around this is that you would need to hook into the form OnSize and manually resize the filler panel so it sizes as needed. So drag and drop another KryptonPanel onto the remainding client area and then use this code to set its size...

Code: Select all

        protected override void OnSizeChanged(EventArgs e)
        {
            kryptonPanel2.SetBounds(0,
                                    kryptonRibbon1.Height,
                                    ClientSize.Width,
                                    ClientSize.Height - kryptonRibbon1.Height);
            base.OnSizeChanged(e);
        }


I just tried this and it works pretty well.

[swautier]

Phil,

Thanks for the details. Will giv it a try asap.

Keep up with the excellent work.

Serge.