Tabs

The Tabs section defines the tabs that can appear on:

• The dialog displayed when the user opens a node on the canvas
• A model output window
• A document output window

Each Tabs section can contain multiple Tab elements, each of which declares a custom tab to be displayed:

<Tabs defaultTab="integer">
     <Tab ... />
     <Tab ... />
      ...
</Tabs>

where defaultTab is a non-negative integer that specifies which tab is to be displayed when the node dialog or window is opened for the first time in a stream. If the user selects a different tab, on closing and reopening the dialog or window while the stream is active, the most recently viewed tab is displayed instead of the default. Tab numbering starts at 0.

Note that other tabs may be included on the dialog or window automatically--for example, all dialogs and output windows include an Annotations tab, and all data source node dialogs include Filter and Types tabs.

A Tab element must declare the tab label (the text that appears on the tab itself) and should also include a label key to be used as a lookup if the tab label is to be translated.

Within each Tab element is a panel specification, which defines how the main content area of the tab is laid out. The panel specification can be one of three types: text browser, extension object, or properties. See the topic Panel Specifications for more information.

The format of an individual Tab element is:

<Tab id="identifier" label="display_label" labelKey="label_key" helpLink="help_ID" 
          mnemonic="mnemonic_char" mnemonicKey="mnemonic_key" >
     <TextBrowserPanel ... />
     <ExtensionObjectPanel ... />
     <PropertiesPanel ... />
     <ModelViewerPanel ... />
</Tab>

where:

id is a unique identifier that can be used to reference the tab in Java code.

label (required) is the display name for the tab as it is to appear on the user interface.

labelKey identifies the label for localization purposes.

helpLink is the identifier of a help topic to be displayed when the user invokes the help system, if any. The format of the identifier depends on the type of help system (see Defining the Help System Location and Type):

mnemonic is the alphabetic character used in conjunction with the Alt key to activate this control (for example, if you give the value S, the user can activate this control by means of Alt-S).

mnemonicKey identifies the mnemonic for localization purposes. If neither mnemonic nor mnemonicKey is used, no mnemonic is available for this control. See the topic Access Keys and Keyboard Shortcuts for more information.

Examples

For examples of Tab elements, see the sections on the different types of panel specification that they can contain: Text Browser Panel, Extension Object Panel, Properties Panel, and Model Viewer Panel.