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Layouting: books, pages, headers,...

Widgets are like real-world books, but with dynamic and interactive content. By 'dynamic content' we mean content that can change over time, 'interactive content' points to graphical elements that react to user input (e.g. buttons). In order for a widget to have some visual representation, it should contain at least one page.

A page (VisualPage) consists of three optional parts:

  • a header pane (VisualHeader): the part of the page that is always visible at the top of the screen. This part cannot contain interactive elements (but can contain dynamic elements).
  • a footer pane (VisualFooter): the part of the page that is always visible at the bottom of the screen. Like a header it can contain dynamic content, but no interactive content.
  • the content pane (VisualContent): the center part of page. The content pane can contain both dynamic and interactive content. This pane is not limited to any size and will scroll when the screensize is too small to display all content.

An example of this structure: 

<VisualPage>
	<VisualHeader>
		<VisualText Text="Place header text here"/>
	</VisualHeader>
	<VisualContent>
		<VisualText Text="Place your dynamic and interactive content here" MultiLine="true"/>
	</VisualContent>
	<VisualFooter>
		<VisualText Text="Place footer text here"/>
	</VisualFooter>
</VisualPage>

This yields following result:

Just like physical pages, multiple VisualPages can be orginised in a book (VisualBook). At all times, only one page will be visible. The currently visible page is set through the 'CurrentPage' attribute of the VisualBook. 

<VisualBook CurrentPage="page1">
	<VisualPage Name="page1">
		<VisualContent>
			<VisualText Text="first page"/>
		</VisualContent>
	</VisualPage>
	<VisualPage Name="page2">
		<VisualContent>
			<VisualText Text="second page"/>
		</VisualContent>
	</VisualPage>
</VisualBook>