How can I make the WPF TabControl appear as it is with MultiLine = false in Windows forms (default).

Question

In Windows Forms the default behaviour of a TabControl is to have the tabs spill out to a scrollable area if they consume too much space (MultiLine = false).

What is the best approach to achieving this behavior in WPF?

UPDATE

I was trying to find a solution using TabControl.ItemsPanel but it seems anything I put in there gets completely ignored, so for this reason I've gone the hard way and started with TabControl.Template which is mind boggling that we have to do it this way if it turns out to be the correct approach.

Extremely far from being complete, my starting solution to the problem is as follows.

<TabControl>
  <TabControl.Template>
    <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type TabControl}">
      <DockPanel>
        <ScrollViewer DockPanel.Dock="Top"
                      HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Auto"
                      VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Disabled">
          <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" IsItemsHost="True" />
        </ScrollViewer>
        <ContentPresenter ContentSource="SelectedContent" />
      </DockPanel>
    </ControlTemplate>
  </TabControl.Template>
  <TabItem Header="One">First</TabItem>
  <TabItem Header="Two">Second</TabItem>
  <TabItem Header="Three">Third</TabItem>
  <TabItem Header="Four">Fourth</TabItem>
  <TabItem Header="Five">Fifth</TabItem>
</TabControl>

Answer 1

Hey Brett, the easiest option is to set the ItemsPanelTemplate on the TabControl. I think the default is WrapPanel, hence the Multiline behaviour. Change it to StackPanel for example and maybe add a ScrollViewer.

Something like this (just coding this without VS)

<TabControl>

<TabControl.ItemsPanel>

<ItemsPanelTemplate>

<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"/>

</ItemsPanelTemplate>

</TabControl.ItemsPanel>

</TabControl>

hope that helps a bit...

Answer 2

Your solution to replace the template seems to be the best way to do this. The default panel for the TabItems is a TabPanel, and I don't see anything like a "should wrap" property on it.

The documentation contains an example of replacing the TabControl template with a different TabPanel:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.controls.primitives.tabpanel.aspx

Answer 3

i had the same problem few years ago, my solution was to limit the size of the header, and the panel that contains it, of course you need to make your own template like what you started, and also i need to implement some scrolling support so i put two repeat buttons at the left and right side of the scroll viewer.

my inspiration was a nice project from code project called IE tabs in wpf. it's old as wpf and works good

Answer 4

In working to make a TabControl where the tabs are stacked vertically along the left, I found this solution for you:

http://www.blogs.intuidev.com/post/2010/02/10/TabControlStyling_PartThree.aspx

Pretty impressive stuff!

Answer 5

I know this is an older post, but I wanted to add another idea should others be searching this on the internet.

If you set the width of the tabpanel to something larger it will be (assuming this is not a tabpanel that allows the user to continue to add other tabs in it). If you have the user adding new tabs to the tab panel, then a scroll bar will need to be added.