Customizing Views layout, e.g., making certain fields visible, changing their locations is something that XAF developers usually learn and appreciate from day one. That is because you can drastically change the UI of your app by just moving the mouse and without any coding and recompilation, also at runtime.
The next maintenance release (v17.2.6) should come with a few minor improvements to the customization forms in DetailView, ListView and the Model Editor, which we hope will be welcomed by both developers and end-users as well.
- The customization forms will preserve their size and position. In the Model Editor, the settings will be stored permanently either in the Application Model (runtime) or in the *.SUO file (design time). The same form at runtime will maintain its settings during application life time only. This small difference is intentional: it should still be convenient to make several extensive customizations at once, but will certainly avoid any possible confusion and support calls from end-users saving and forgetting their forms in some unexpected place/state. This must work fine with multiple monitors, tabbed MDI and SDI, multiple root and nested Views (last closed form settings win). Anyway, should you notice anything unexpected here during your tests, please let us know.
- The customization forms will have the search box enabled by default. In real world applications with 100-200 items it should greatly save time on searching a required item.
- The customization forms will handle the Up/Down Arrow and Delete keys to quickly navigate or remove items in the main list. Again, it must save time in complex apps.
- The last item added from the Object Model dialog will be focused in all the customization forms. We experimented with this a few months ago and decided to enable this helpful function everywhere.
- Finally and not related to the customization forms, we have enabled the behavior shown in this blog post by default. Note that here we intentionally did not add another grouping level by namespace, not to complicate access, but we welcome to your thoughts on it.
As always, my team and I welcome your feedback on these improvements if you want to test the nightly 17.2 build: DevExpressNETComponents-17.2.exe. This test build does NOT yet include certain functionalities for the PivotChart, TreeListEditor and PivotGridListEditor, so test them with the GridListEdior and DetailView's layout for now. Should you have problems with the customization forms or anything else, we will be more than happy to listen and help.