Dock for ASP.NET AJAX

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Overview

With the help of the Telerik RadDock control for ASP.NET AJAX you can manage multiple windows and even the layout of your web page. It represents a moveable content placeholder which can be dragged around the Web page, docked into docking zones, collapsed into a minimized state, expanded to display their content, and pinned in place – all the familiar features found within Visual Studio .NET. The customized page layout can be saved to a file or database and reloaded for later use allowing for dynamic user-defined interfaces.

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Features

Docking Controls
The Telerik Docking controls consist of:
- RadDockLayout –Defines the area for which all RadDockZones and RadDocks can be placed on a page while having no visual representation to the client. At design time RadDockZone and RadDock controls are placed within a RadDockLayout in order to manage their layout.
- RadDockZone – A static placeholder where RadDock controls can be docked. The control can be set up as a forbidden or allowed zone for RadDocks which determines if they can dock within a certain zone.
- RadDock – A movable content placeholder which can be dragged around the screen, docked inside of a RadDockZone, collapsed, expanded, and pinned. The RadDock contains both the content area as well as a title bar.
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Customizing the Docking Object

The Telerik ASP.NET AJAX Dock control allows for various customization capabilities like resize, expand, collapse, close, pin or un-pin. The dynamic page layout can also be enabled for customization or be set in read-only mode. RadDock controls are designed to be dragged by the user and dropped to various locations around the web page. You gain complete control over the layout and excellent drag-and-drop behavior using the Grips or TitleBar DockHandle property.
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Customizing the Docking Zones

To achieve greater control over layout, developers can restrain the docking of particular docks to certain docking zone or a specific type of dock zones. In addition, the widths and heights of the zones can be fixed or resizable. When dockable objects are dragged and hovered over a docking zone the zone itself becomes highlighted. It is fully possible to specify the highlighting style for each docking zone and even set the orientation of RadDockZone to horizontal or vertical.
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The Telerik ASP.NET Dock control offers several types of docking zones: horizontal, vertical, top, bottom, right or left. To achieve a fine-tuned control, developers can restrain the docking of certain objects only to a certain type of docking zones. The docking zones can be set to have fixed width and/or height or to be resizable, which is their default state.
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Action Commands

The ASP.NET AJAX Dock control by Telerik offers standard action commands including expand, collapse, pin, unpin, and close. These are enabled by setting the corresponding behavior within the properties of the RadDock control. In accordance with the specified behaviors, the buttons of the corresponding predefined commands will be shown in the dock object. The built-in commands perform their function without any need for additional programming. Aside from these commands developers can create custom commands and handle them either on the client-side or on server-side.

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Various Docking Modes
RadDock can have the following docking modes:
- Default – Dockable objects can be either docked or floating
- Docked – RadDock control will always be docked in a RadDockZone
- Floating – Docks cannot be docked to a docking zone and are always floating
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Client-side API and Events
The Telerik ASP.NET Dock control provides a rich client-side API that lets you interact with the controls and docking zones in client-side code. In addition to a full set of client-side events, the client-side object model lets you manipulate the dock controls and docking zones while avoiding unnecessary post-backs.
Some of the key client-side API functions include:
- Expand/Collapse All Objects in a Zone
- Reorder Objects in a Zone
- Accessing Child Controls
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Extensive VS.NET Design-time Support
Telerik ASP.NET Dock fully supports the Design mode of Visual Studio .NET, which allows you to visually interact with the dock controls. The design-view even allows modification of the content of the dockable objects through templates. Some other key capabilities are:
- Smart Tag - Lets you easily change the skin for your control or quickly get help.
- RadDock Collection Editor – Very useful for locating RadDock controls and setting their properties when the RadDockZone control has multiple child RadDock controls.
- DockCommand Collection Editor – Lets you add commands to a RadDock control. The commands added here appear on the title bar of the control.
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Content
RadDock supports different types of content– text, images, html, and even other controls. There are three ways to customize the content of the Telerik ASP.NET Dock controls
- Create ContentTemplate – In design mode you can add controls to the ContentTemplate property and RadDock will automatically display them in run time.
- Add controls to the ContentContainer – This is the container control for the ContentTemplate. It is slightly easier to implement, but you cannot easily reuse the template in other controls.
- Set the Text property – If the RadDock control’s purpose is to display only plain text, this property can be used instead of adding controls to the ContentTemplate or the ContentContainer.
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Save/Load Layout State

All changes made to the dynamic page layouts can be stored on the server in a database and be reloaded when needed. This is an excellent way for portal customization and preservation of user layout settings.
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XHTML and Accessibility Standards Compliancy

The Telerik ASP.NET AJAX Dock is compliant with the XHTML 1.1 requirement. The RadDock also follows Section 508 compliance and falls under the W3C Compliance Level “A” as defined by the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0/2.0.
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Animation Effects

In order to enrich the UI with smooth objects movement, resizing, docking and undocking you can add animation effects. Developers can control the various settings like duration and frames per second, which affect the quality of the animation and client CPU load.
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Appearance
Telerik ASP.NET AJAX RadDock is shipped with a rich set of skins that allow you to easily build slick interfaces with the look-and-feel of Windows 7 and Office 2007. You can also override certain characteristics of the skin and control the appearance of individual elements like:
- The entire dock, title bar, command items, tooltips and drag operations of dockable objects
- The layout, highlighting, border, and background of docking zones
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Industry-Best Cross-Browser Support

Following our long tradition of wide cross-browser support, Telerik ASP.NET AJAX RadDock is not an exception. The component supports all major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera as well as Google Chrome. Opening a page containing the control in these various browsers will always produce identical results.
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VS Plug-in for Testing RadControls

Telerik's automated software testing tool Test Studio employs a rich set of features to help you automate AJAX-intense web content. You can test complex UI actions like drag-and-drop, invoke JavaScript functions from your test code, and perform logging actions. Additionally, the test recorder makes it easy to wait on AJAX operations before executing a specific verification. What’s more, Test Studio is the best way to test RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. The powerful test recorder automatically detects the controls and exposes commonly used verifications. Learn more
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