The Tab Strip and Tab parts are used to organize information better by defining multiple viewable "pages" for some area of a window. A Tab Strip appears as a set of notebook page tabs. A user of your application navigates through the pages you have defined by clicking on their respective tabs. This causes the selected page to be brought to the front. When you first drop a Tab Strip, it has no Tabs. You add them separately. The Tabs can be labeled with text, bitmaps, or both.
Let's take a look at how you might use the Tab Strip and Tab parts. We will start building up a simple example to illustrate their use. We'll extend this example later to illustrate the use of the other Windows 95 visual parts.
Create an application for this example part or select another application and create a new visual part named Win95PartsExample.
In the Composition Editor, do the following:
To make our example part more visually appealing, we're also going to add icons to the tabs. Open the settings for the following tabs and modify the graphicsDescriptor property so it specifies the designated number for an icon in the file abtbmp50.dll:
To open a tab's setting, select the tab, then select the box below the tab and double-click.
Win95PartsExample now looks something like this.
Test the part. Click on the three different tabs to navigate through the pages.
If you use icons instead of text for your tab labels, or even if you use text labels or both as we did, you can add text to assist users (hover help). This text displays when a user pauses a mouse pointer over a tab. Let's do this for our example part:
Test the part again. Move your mouse over the tabs and pause it on
each tab to see the text assists. It should look something like
this.
Using a tab strip and tabs, we have defined a control for our example part that will organize the remaining parts of the example on three pages.