What design alternatives are there for nested page controls?

Question

In our primary application, we have a form that will allow us to do cross tab analysis of data in four different ways. Presently, each analysis appears in its own page of a PageControl on the screen. Now, upper management would like us to add in a historical aspect to the form, which in other areas we would use a PageControl to do, but nesting two of them seems like a bad idea to display the periods and analyses tabs stacked on top of each other. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how we could re-work this to look decent and work well? Thanks.

Answer 1

What about using the TTabset control along the bottom of the form to allow switching between the historical periods and the current data? I would also make sure that there was a visual difference in how the data is presented for historical vs current data. Like use an off grey cell background for historical data.

Answer 2

Use an small (horizontal) TTabSet with a vertical one.

See here (you can click on the picture to zoom). The TTabSet is shipped OOTB with Delphi. The vertical one can be written very easily if your requirements are low. If you want, I can share the code. But if you want a better vertical tab set then you can spend more time on writing or get one which is ready made from Torry or somewhere else.

HTH.

Answer 3

IMHO, you can use frames for each analysis result page, then you can use either PageControl or TabSet or any other visual control for loading and showing the appropriate frame.

Since frames are totally independent from the visual control you use to select proper period and analysis, you won't be restricted to tab-based controls; for example you can have a tabset for analysis selection, and a treeview for period selection.

Frames have some additional benefits here too:

• First of all, their code is kept in separate units and this will increase code readability.
• Second, you can design a base frame and put all the controls and codes which all these 4 analysis share into that base frame, and in this way have a better code reuse.
• Third, you can either drop each frame on your main form and make them load just like before, or you can define a container control (e.g a panel), and based on user's selection load one of the frames into the container control dynamically, so reduce initial load time of your application, and probably reduce the overall system resource consumption.