Run-Time Customization for Toolbars

C1ToolBars can be customizable at run time by setting the CustomizeButton property to True at design time.

Note: The toolbar needs to be placed inside a C1CommandDock before you set its CustomizeButton property to True at design-time.

When the customization is enabled a drop-down arrow appears on the toolbar at design time.

The pop-up menu appears at run time when you click on the drop-down arrow.

The Customize toolbars menu operates as follows:

Add or Remove Buttons

Clicking on a command item from the menu removes the command button from the toolbar.

Reset

Clicking on the Reset menu item resets the toolbar back to its original setting.

Customize

Clicking on Customize menu item opens the Customize toolbars dialog box.

The Customize Dialog contains three tabs for modifying the C1ToolBar component:

Toolbars – This tab contains options for creating, renaming, deleting, and modifying the C1ToolBar component.
Commands – This tab contains options for adding existing commands to the toolbars.
Options – This tab contains options for modifying the C1ToolBars general appearance properties such as its look and feel and its font and color.

On the bottom of each tab in the Customize toolbars dialog box, there is a Save, Restore, Reset, OK, and Cancel command button which can be used to save the updated settings of the toolbar, restore the update settings, reset the default settings, accept the new settings, and cancel the Customize toolbars respectively.

For the end-user customizations to be persisted in the application config file, command holder's Environment property must be added to dynamic properties.

Note: The user interface for dynamic properties has been removed from Visual Studio 2005. It still supports the dynamic properties. For more information about using the dynamic properties, please see the following topic in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 documentation: Introduction to Dynamic Properties (Visual Studio).

To Save the Layout in the Application's .Config File:

Click on the C1CommandHolder in the form's Component Tray.
Expand the DynamicProperties node and then click on the ellipsis button next to the Advanced property.

The Dynamic Properties dialog box appears.
Click the Layout check box and then click OK. This will make Layout saved in the application's .config file instead of in the form's code.

Note: When you run your program from the Visual Studio's designer, Visual Studio creates an app.config file in the project directory, and then on each run replaces the actual application's .config file (located in the bin directory) with that app.config file's contents. As a result, if you run the project in Visual Studio, change the toolbars layout, close it and then run it again, you won't see the last layout restored. This is not a bug, everything works fine when the application is not run from Visual Studio.

In addition to saving your toolbar layout using the form's dynamic properties you can also use your own scheme for saving and restoring the toolbars layout. For finer control, save and set the value of the Layout property in your code instead.

Toolbars

The Toolbars tab contains options for creating and manipulating toolbars.

By default, the ButtonLook and the CustomizeButton properties are disabled.

The Button Layout properties are enabled when the ButtonLook property is set to Text and Image(the Text and Image radio button is selected). This is because the ButtonLayoutHorz property determines how the text is placed by the image (above, below, to the left, or to the right of the image).

The CustomizeButton is enabled when a new C1ToolBar is added to the dialog box.

Commands

The Commands tab contains two list boxes: Categories and Commands. The Categories list box contains the categories for all of the commands. The Commands list box contains all of the commands for each category.

Note: The Categories list box appears empty if the Category property is not set for the commands.

Commands can be easily added to the toolbars by doing either of the following:

Selecting a category from the Categories list box.
Selecting a command from the Commands list box and then dragging it to the desired toolbar.

The following image illustrates a command being dragged from the Commands list to the Format toolbar on the form at run time.

Options

The Options tab contains options for modifying C1ToolBar’s general appearance properties such as its look and feel and its colors and font.