Window without an IFRAME?

[Jeremy T. Fuller]

We recently began migrating to the new Prometheus suite of controls, and have been extremely happy with the quality of the software. Telerik has simply done an amazing job with the controls, and we couldn't be happier. Consequently, we are right now trying to migrate all of our existing ComponentArt controls over to Telerik.

We've run into one thing ComponentArt does that Telerik does not: a dialog box where the source of the content comes directly from the page (via templates).

We absolutely love the new Telerik RadWindow control -- the skins, functionality and performance are awesome. But the control was built to only utilize external pages (through an IFRAME). This doesn't work for us -- we absolutely need the content of the dialog to come from the page itself.

We'd really like to ditch ComponentArt if at all possible. Is there anything on your roadmap to enable internal content for RadWindow? Or is there a way to hack the control to do it now? (We looked briefly at RadDock -- that's not what we need.) If not, we'll keep using ComponentArt's Dialog control for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for your help and for all the work you're doing on this suite. I really respect that you started from scratch with this -- it shows.

[Shaun Peet]

Have you tried the ToolTip control?

[Jeremy T. Fuller]

ToolTip isn't a dialog box. We need the full functionality of RadWindow, with the contents of the window coming from the page.

[Shaun Peet]

RadToolTip Prometheus can indeed be used as a dialog:

http://www.telerik.com/demos/aspnet/prometheus/ToolTip/Examples/ToolTip/DefaultCS.aspx

[Jeremy T. Fuller]

ToolTip is indeed a very nice control, and gets very close to being a dialog box, but doesn't quite go all the way. The main missing ingredient is a built in skin that looks like a RadWindow skin. The dialog also needs to be moveable, etc. We need a full API behind it that is designed for dialog boxes, not tooltips. We'll stick with ComponentArt on this one (which is sad, because Telerik writes much better code). I bet the distance between the current RadWindow control and what we need is very small. Just need to substitute the IFRAME with a child control tree.

I do appreciate the help!

[Georgi Tunev]

Hello Jeremy,

I can perfectly understand why you need to have this feature in RadWindow, however at this point I cannot tell for sure when or if we will implement it.

Changing the architecture of the control is not an easy task - yes, we can do it, however then we will need to support 2 main features then - showing the content of a different page and having the opportunity to load content from the same page. This will require major reworking of the whole API and adding extra code which has its price - the size of the Dll and scripts for example.
When we created the RadControls suite we considered these facts and decided to go with several smaller controls that are specialized for certain tasks. For example RadWindow is intended to replace the standard browser's dialog (window.open()) and the browser's popups (alert,prompt,confirm) and just as the browser's dialog, it shows external content only. For scenarios where the content should be on the same page we developed the RadDock control. Can you please let me know what are the problems that you experience with RadDock? We are constantly improving it and if there is a feature that you need in it, we can consider adding it in a future release.

Best wishes,
Georgi Tunev
the Telerik team

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