 UltimatePanel Features |
UltimatePanel is a toolset to build your DHTML panels for ASP.NET. It is
composed of two main components: UltimatePanelDesigner and UltimatePanel.
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UltimatePanelDesigner is an ASP.NET application
that helps you visually design your ASP.NET panel. You can use it either as a stand-alone application, or directly from inside VS.NET. You can save your ASP.NET panel in one of the
following forms, which will be consumed by the UltimatePanel control at run-time:
1. Save as an XML file on your machine.
2. Save into a database such as SQL Server, Access, etc.
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UltimatePanel is an ASP.NET server
control that generates your DHTML ASP.NET panel. All you have to do is drag-and-drop the
UltimatePanel control onto your web page at design-time, and set the source of your control in one of the
following forms:
1. Set PanelSource to an XML file at design-time or run-time.
2. Set PanelSourceXml to an XML string at run-time.
3. Set DatabaseConnStr and DatabasePanelID at design-time or run-time.
4. Set DataSource to a dataset at run-time.
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Here is a list of some of the basic features of UltimatePanel:
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PanelSource: You can set the source of the panel to an XML file at
design-time or run-time, or to an XML string at run-time.
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DataBinding: You can set the source of the panel to a database connection string and panel id at design-time or run-time, or to a dataset that you
created from a database by using ADO.NET at run-time.
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UserRights (DataBinding): Using the DataBinding techniques you can easily display
different sets of panel items per user depending on their privileges by only
making a simple join operation on your panel and user tables. As a matter of
fact you will have the power and flexibility to load your panel from as many
tables as you want based on your implementation needs.
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UserRights (Properties): Using the CurrentUser, CurrentUserSessionVar and AllowedUsers
properties you can display different portions of the same panel to different
users. When you set the CurrentUser to the name of the user logged into your
website panel control will check his name against a comma separated list of
users defined in the AllowedUsers property of each item.
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ClientPersistenceAll: The previous version was only keeping the group
states (open or close) and their positions (for draggable groups). The new
version keeps the states of all items inside each group. Therefore if you have
a treeview structure inside your groups and the user opens some of the
subgroups in those groups their states will be saved and loaded from the last
visit.
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ShowHide: You can set the ShowHide property to True to make your panel
invisible on either side of the browser window. It automatically creates an
additional item near the panel, and when the user moves the mouse over this
item the panel gets displayed. When the mouse is moved out of the panel area it
gets hidden again. You can also set the ShowHideOnClick property to True to let
the user click on the additional item to show/hide the panel rather than moving
mouse over and out of this item.
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Overlay: You can set the PanelOverlay property to let the panel open
over IE windowed controls such as select boxes and ActiveX controls. The panel
will partially cover these controls rather than hiding them altogether.
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HotKey: You can set a hotkey (shortcut key combination) to a panel item
so that the user can press that combination to activate that item as if it is
clicked by mouse. This keyboard support might also be helpful for disabled
users who can learn the shortcut keys to operate and navigate your website.
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AutoGroupHeight: You don't need to set the GroupHeight property of each
group any more. When you leave it blank the control will automatically adjust
its height based on the items in it.
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DisplayTypes: Display property of a group can be set to AlwaysOpen,
AlwaysClosed, InitallyOpen or InitiallyClosed.
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ItemStatus: You can display text at the status line of the browser
window when the mouse is over each panel item.
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MultiLevel: You can have as many hierarchical levels as you
want in your panel groups. In fact each group might hold a different tree view
structure so that you can have multiple tree views inside one UltimatePanel
control.
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MultiPanel: You can have as many UltimatePanel controls as
you want on a web page. Each control will have its own source to render.
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MultiGroupOpen: You can have multiple groups open
simultaneously. This is the default characteristic of the panel. You can click
a group header to open the group underneath, and click again to close it.
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GroupDrag: You can drag and drop the groups by clicking on
the group header and moving the group to change its position in the panel
hierarchy. The user might change your panel structure dynamically to get a
better user experience. IE5+ only.
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ClientPersistence: You can save and load the latest state of
the panel on the client machine so that when the user revisits your website or
refreshes the web page the panel will appear as in the last visit. This is a
very useful feature to keep the user preferences alive in terms of open and
closed groups, and their positions after drag operations. IE5+ only.
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GroupSlip: You can create panels in which a group slips when
the user clicks on the group header to open or close it. The speed of the slip
operation can be customized by setting the SlipIncrement and SlipTimeout
properties accordingly.
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AutoFillFrame: You can use this feature so that when the
user drags the frame border or the window border to make it larger or smaller
the panel automatically fits the size of the frame both vertically and
horizontally.
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AutoScroll: You can set AutoScrollVertical and
AutoScrollHorizontal properties to automatically scroll the panel vertically
and horizontally when the user scrolls the page. The speed of the scroll
operation can be customized by setting the AutoScrollTimeout, SmoothIncrement
and SmoothTimeout properties accordingly.
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Vertical Scroll Bar: When the items inside a group take more
space than the group height a vertical scrollbar appears automatically. The
style of the scrollbar can be modifed by setting the scroll styles inside the
group CSS class.
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AdjustHeightOnItemClick: When you have multiple hierarchical
levels such as in tree view you can set this property of the group to
automatically increase/decrease group height when you expand/collapse the items
inside that group. Therefore the group height will adapt itself according to
its open contents rather than displaying a vertical scroll bar.
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ServerControl: You can set the item type to ServerControl if
you want to insert a server control (asp:control) or a combination of server
and HTML controls into the UltimatePanel control on a web form (aspx page). You
can use this method to locate all sorts of HTML structures and server controls
including UltimatePanel itself in a nested form as well as the UltimatePanel
control for an ultimate navigation experience. You can also put data listing
controls such as DataGrid, DataList and DropDownList, and bind them to a data
source such a SQL database or an XML stream as can be seen in the provided
samples.
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HideScrollBars: You can hide horizontal and vertical
scrollbars of a group on purpose. These scrollbars automatically appear around
a panel groups unless you set the HideScrollBars property of the group to True.
This property should be set to True when you insert an UltimatePanel control
into your group, which will pop up subpanels outside the panel area. Otherwise,
it will try to open the subpanels inside the group area and they would be
invisible if they can't fit into the group.
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Filter & Transition: Most common filters and transitions
are available to create more sophisticated panels for better user experience.
IE5+ only.
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Marquee: You can have content rotation with the help of this
feature. Contents of each group can be scrolled in four directions, and the
speed can be adjusted with the provided parameters. Groups to be rotated might
have either regular items or HTML content. IE5+ only.
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HtmlContent: You can set the HtmlContent property of a group
to a string of HTML tags, and it will override the items in that group to
display the HTML content as is.
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Frames: If you don't want to put the panel on every web page
(even though it is very common to put the panel control into a user control to
be inserted into all web pages) you can locate your panel into a navigation
frame and set the TargetFrame property to the name of the frame to open your
web pages in.
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Highlight Path: When you set the HighlightPath property of
your panel to True, the selected item and its group header will be highlighted.
Item and group header might have different select styles. The selection is
handled automatically by finding the item in the panel, which has the same URL
as the current page. This feature doesn't work with frames because it is not
possible to get the page info in another frame from the current page on
server-side.
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PathFindingMethod: You can select the method to find the
navigation path. It can be either MatchPathAndQuery or MatchPathOnly. Default
is MatchPathAndQuery, which tries to match item's URL with the current page's
URL including the path and the query string. MatchPathOnly discards the query
string and tries to match only the path portion of item's URL with current
page's URL.
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SelectedItemID: You can override the automatic matching
process handled by setting the SelectedItemID. If HighlightPath is True and
SelectedItemID is left blank, UltimatePanel tries to find the selected item by
using either MatchPathAndQuery or MatchPathOnly algorithms. However, if
SelectedItemID has a value UltimatePanel will not attempt to find the selected
item automatically but it will instead use this value as the selected item, and
find the navigation path starting from this item and traversing the
hierarchical panel up to the top.
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GetNavigationPath: This public method gets an argument,
PathDelimiter, and returns the navigation path. It gives you the ability to
display a panel path to illustrate to the user his current position in the
hierarchial panel structure.
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SetItemAttribute: This public method gets item id, attribute name and attribute value, and changes the value of the specified attribute of the specified item.
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BaseURL: You can set the virtual path to be added as a
prefix to every ItemURL. Note that "/" is not required at the end of the
virtual path. If omitted, UltimatePanel will handle it accordingly. Items may
override this value if they have a URL property that starts with an absolute
path starting with '/' or 'http://' or 'file://', or including a '\' in it.
Also note that if the item has a URL starting with '~' it will automatically
replace '~' with the application path.
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Panel Position: By default, the panel will appear at the
position where you drag-and-drop the control. However, you may use the Left and
Top properties to set the absolute position for run-time.
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Relative Positioning: You don't need to do anything special
for relative positioning. When you drag-and-drop the panel control into a table
cell, it will automatically position itself relative to the table cell you
locate it in.
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Client-Side Events: When the user clicks an item, a
JavaScript function can be called in addition to redirecting to a URL.
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Server-Side PostBack: When the user clicks an item, a
server-side event can be raised, which will return a postback value to server.
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Cross-Browser Support: IE4+, NS6+, Mozilla 1.0+, Opera 7.5+.
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Compliancy: XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant.
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Compatibility: Microsoft ASP.NET Web Matrix, IBuySpy Portal Framework.
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System Requirements: Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista, IIS 5.0+, .NET Framework 1.0/1.1/2.0/3.0.
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