The difference here is that instead of using forms, you use User Controls basically. We have a BasePage that has all of the same functionality as the BaseForm. So it isn't that hard of a move, you would be able to move your controls, code, etc. over from a dialog to an inherited BasePage. But like anything else, when you make a drastic change to the UI there is always a little elbow grease that has to go into it.
But this is something that we plan to offer in the future...standard dialog MDI interface (current logic) or our folder based MDI. This is why having our own large-scale commercial application is so good for SF....we go through the fire first
Do you have an approximate timescale on when the MDI control would be available (even if an early beta)?
For anyone wanting to convert to the MDI format in the future, do you expect it to be a copy and paste of the fields to convert an existing dialog into the MDI control?
Very interesting indeed!
As for the tabs...no, these are our own tabs. We created a custom MDI environment for our medical application that uses a folder based approach versus dialog windows. The tabs that you see is a custom control that we wrote for our medical app...and before you ask...we will probably be creating a new interface control in the future for SF that would allow you to create an MDI environment like this...but we will finish working out all of the kinks in our medical app first
I like your little screenshot - nice UI!
Is that one of your SF themes? Also, can you tell us if you are using an UltraTab or UltraExplorer?
Thanks,
Aaron
No This is a static control that is like the Office notification windows...what you could do, though, is create an info that InfoBox that comes up with the number of errors, and then what we do is have a link that appears on the dialog that they can click and view all of the broken rules...in our medical app they can even click the item and it will take them to the field in question.
Then once they click the link it presents the following window:
Then if they click any of the links (in blue) it closes this dialog and automatically navigates them to the appropriate control.
This is just the approach that we took, but I thought that this might give you an idea or two. Hope it helps.