prefsui.library

This library allows you to easily create content-rich and highly flexible preference or item property panels based around standard Windows controls.

Key Features

• Designed for use with both COM and scripted languages
• Integrates seemlessly with Windows XP Visual Styles
• Fully extensible - will load third-party developed AddOns
• Large selection of built-in controls
• Cosmetically enhanced

All standard user interface objects are included, such as buttons, checkboxes, edit fields, password fields and drop-down listboxes.

As well as the standard controls, a number of enhanced controls are also available - including a colour selector, URL control, and folder and file selectors.

All controls are created using standard Windows components so consequently they all support Visual Styles, which first appeared with Windows XP. prefsui.library will do the necessary initialization to work with the current Visual Style; the developer just needs to provide a manifest along with the executable.

The library has also been carefully constructed to be fully accessible from less powerful languages such as VBScript. dotWidget already provides a partially configured melonPrefs panel to widgets to allow them to display a standard settings interface to the user, but there's no reason why a script-based object couldn't create its own preferences panel.

And for the more technically-savvy, additional controls can also be created and packaged up into an AddOn which prefsui will load when it initializes. A single AddOn can provide an unlimited number of individual controls and, due to the way the interfaces have been defined, multiple names can refer to the same control (e.g. "color_picker", "colour_picker") which makes them more internationally portable.

Aside from the revised graphical appearance and many new controls, prefsui also introduces another new feature not available in melonPrefs: the Control Roster. This provides a list of all the available controls which have been loaded into prefsui. Externally developed AddOns can replace existing controls - even the default built-in ones - by simply providing controls with the same name, making prefsui even more extensible.

The roster can be queried to find a particular control, or simply to list all loaded controls. Information about each control can be retrieved, as well as details about the AddOn that provides it.

A Panel is an active, rather than passive, item - when the user checks a tick box, clicks a button, or picks an item from a list a message is sent to the message port provided when the panel was created. This message contains a set of pre-defined items that can be queried to find out what the user did, and from the the panel contents can be updated accordingly.

More Screenshots

The extended Listbox control displaying PNG images

Rich Edit control