Ryan Phelan » FlexLib http://www.rphelan.com Exploring Flex, Design, and Visualization Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:56:14 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Adding dock functionality to FlexMDI Part I http://www.rphelan.com/2008/03/09/adding-dock-functionality-to-flexmdi-part-i/ http://www.rphelan.com/2008/03/09/adding-dock-functionality-to-flexmdi-part-i/#comments Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:55:46 +0000 Ryan http://www.rphelan.com/archives/5 Ben Clinkinbeard gave a great presentation at 360|Flex Atlanta about an open source project he's working on called FlexMDI (MDI stands for multiple document interface). I won't go into a lot of detail, but it's a really amazing windowing system (based on mx.controls.Panel) that has minimize, maximize, etc., and is fully resizable & skinnable. I've been working on a similar project, so I thought I'd see if I could combine them.

Here's the plan:
My goal is to extend this library to support docking. I'd like to take a cue from Adobe's CS3 product line, and enable three different types of docking:

  1. Dragging or resizing a window to within a certain distance of another will cause it to "snap" into alignment.
  2. Dragging a window onto the bottom section of another will cause them to combine into a window stack that moves and resizes as a single unit.
  3. Dragging a window onto the title bar of another window will create a single window with a tab bar at the top.

To keep things simple, I'm tackling these one at a time. Here's part I:

Application - Source

The FlexMDI guys have graciously accepted my offer to include this in a future update of FlexLib, but the code will likely get refactored a bit first. To illustrate the added functionality, I separated it out into two new classes: MDIDockCanvas and MDIDockManager. These will probably end up getting merged back into the MDICanvas and MDIManager classes respectively.

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