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Grouping Controls

Grouping controls allows you to align controls together in columns, indicate the relationship of associated controls using a surrounding frame, and nest groups within groups.

Controls are ordered linearly in the PPGLayout: that is, the order in which you declare the controls is the order in which they appear on the property page.

To group a set of controls together, insert the PPGLayout.AddGroup call before the first member-to-be and the PPGLayout.EndGroup call after the last.

When you omit the last PPGLayout.EndGroup call, all controls from the preceding PPGLayout.AddGroup call to the last control on the page will be part of that group.

When you create your group control you can optionally specify a label and a frame (both or none) and the percentage of a row that the group will occupy, if applicable.

You can also set these and other attributes dynamically by using the PPGItem.SetAttribute method with one of these item attributes:

Group controls can be enumerated by setting up a loop using the PPGLayout.Count property and testing each PPGLayout.Item to see if it’s a group (see Changing the Layout for more information).

The PPGLayout.Item property takes either the index or the name of the item, so you can test it using the PPGItem.Type property as in the following example:

function ChangeLastGroupLabel_OnClicked() {
   // Loop backwards through the list of items to find the group tag 
   // that starts the last group 
   for (var i=PPG.PPGLayout.Count-1; i>=0; i--) {

       // Test for "GroupBegin" (type of opening tag)
       if (PPG.PPGLayout.Item(i).Type == "GroupBegin") {

          // When we find it, reset the label
          PPG.PPGLayout.Item(i).Label = "Last Group";
          PPG.PPGLayout.Item(i).SetAttribute( siUIShowFrame, false );

          // We need to refresh the layout to see the changes and then
          // we're done!
          PPG.Refresh();
          break;
       }
   }
}

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