Can you hide controls in the IDE?

I am looking to start using the control containers but on the page where I want to put them it is going to get a bit cluttered during design. I was wondering if it is possible to hide a control in the IDE when you are not playing with it?

No, you can’t temporarily hide controls in the IDE. But a busy Window is one good reason to break down the interface into ContainerControls in the future.

I have used ContainerControls which contain other controls. I have say 5 container controls but only one is displayed to the user depending on what button they press. The problem is that I have the 5 container controls on the page, one on top of each other and it becomes very messy very quickly. It would be nice if you could have a shortcut key to hide all controls except the one you currently had select on the menu.

well you can put a control out of the window (above and below a window aka negative top and left values) if it helps

Ah thats why they pay you the big bucks!!! :wink: I never thought of doing that, but it would still be nice to be able to hide them in the IDE.

You could use PagePanels in a desktop but I’m guessing this is a web app?

What I do (as an alternative suggestion) is place the controls on the window in roughly the location they will be… if I have some that will occupy the same space at some point I place them either in an empty area, or as suggested off the window.

I then have an “ARRANGE_CONTROLS” routine that places the controls at their pixel perfect locations based on the current state of the application. This is called by RESIZED event, OPEN event and anytime logic of the app dictates that the control sequence needs to be altered.

@Nathan: Haha… just checked my pocket… no bigger bucks in there… they all have the same size :slight_smile:

Thanks everyone for the help, I am using bits of all of them to make it easier to place things and then move them back it at run time. Gavin, the PagePanels would be great if you could do that in a web project, maybe Xojo Inc will consider this for a future version.