Question that has been bothering me and not quite sure how to phrase it to search for it


Basically, imagine an application with a GUI that has tabs or some sort of selection that, when clicked, changes what you are viewing

as a rough example, the SSH suite



When you select different items on the left, a different block is shown to the users that they can interact with on the right.


I am curious as to if this has a name and what sort of techniques are used to produce this effect. I was thinking maybe you just have each item on the left correspond to a different 'panel' (thinking like java panels) and whatever one is selected gets set as viewable in that particular space and the previous one is set to no longer visible?

That doesn't seem right to me though...

anyone know what this is called or how it is done?

it's called a TreeView in .NET

I figured there were tools to do it using popular frameworks, any idea where I can learn about what goes on behind the scenes?

i'm not sure if you're talking about the treeview specifically or navigation in general.

treeview is the tool on the left. pretty sure java's implementation (swing jtree) is open source.

if you're referring to how you control the navigation, then pretty much what you described. there's an event tied to the tree/tab/etc. when the event fires, you unload (hide, tear down, release from memory, etc) the current main panel (jpanel, div, etc) and load the new one. same with any normal navigation bar. works for trees, tabs, etc. sometimes you do it manually, other times frameworks have it for you. then when you create your navigation control, you specify the text as well as the corresponding panel and it takes care of it. android comes to mind

This post was edited by carteblanche on Oct 30 2013 12:37am

This is easy enough to reproduce in Java/Swing using a JTree that drives a JPanel via a TreeSelectionListener. You can even get some interesting fading animation effects if you don't mind including some libraries like SwingX.

yeah this is what I was wondering about