Actipro Avalonia Controls

The Actipro Shared Library is a free collection of common controls and components designed to be used across all Actipro Avalonia products. It provides utility controls for UI enhancement, media handling, and layout adjustments that can be integrated into any Avalonia project.

Key categories include:

• General Controls: UI decorators, specialized buttons, and layout presenters.
• Shapes: Specialized rendering shapes like RingSlice.
• Media: Enhanced color handling via UIColor.
• Menu Factory: Tools for customizing contextual menus.
• Utilities: Extension methods and value converters for Avalonia types.

Actipro provides several free products to serve as a foundation for high-quality applications:

• Themes: Ensures a consistent visual appearance across both Actipro Avalonia controls and native Avalonia controls.
• Shared Library: A common control library used by all Actipro Avalonia controls. It contains useful controls, components, value converters, and utilities.
• Core Library: A UI framework-agnostic class library containing helpful utilities and base classes for .NET projects.

Actipro Docking & MDI is a solution for adding docking tool windows and Multiple Document Interface (MDI) capabilities to Avalonia applications. It supports standard docking layouts, nested dock sites, and side-by-side dock sites.

Key capabilities include:

• Docking Windows: Supports document windows (which can be floated) and tool windows (which can be docked, auto-hidden, floated, or moved into MDI).
• MDI Styles: Supports both tabbed MDI and standard windowed MDI.
• Layout Flexibility: Supports nesting dock sites (hierarchies within a dock site) and linking dock sites (allowing windows to be dragged between different sets of docking windows).
• Workspace Customization: Allows hosting custom content in a workspace area or using 'tool window inner fill mode' where the workspace area is removed.

Actipro Bars provides a suite of built-in controls specifically designed for use within ribbons, toolbars, and menus.

Core Concepts

Most controls share a common set of features including:

• Visuals: Keys, labels, images, titles, and variant sizes.
• Interaction: Key tips, input gesture text, and screen tips.
• Architecture: Full MVVM support and integration with the command model.

Control Implementation Patterns

Controls are often implemented differently depending on the context (Ribbon/Toolbar vs. Menu) to ensure they behave naturally in each environment. For example:

• A Button concept is implemented as a BarButton for ribbons/toolbars and as a BarMenuItem for menus.
• A Popup Button concept is a button in ribbons that opens a popup, or a menu item with a submenu in menus.

The Actipro Ribbon is an Office-like, multi-tabbed user interface designed to host numerous child controls. It is built to scale its layout and contents dynamically based on available window size, ensuring users have fast access to commands regardless of screen real estate.

Key features include:

• Dynamic Layout: Supports multiple layout modes, densities, and automatic resizing/collapsing.
• Organization: Uses Tabs, Groups, and Control Groups to structure commands.
• Navigation: Includes a Quick Access Toolbar (QAT), Application Button (with Backstage or Menu support), and Contextual Tabs for object-specific commands.
• User Experience: Supports Screen Tips (advanced tooltips), Key Tips (keyboard shortcuts), and a Footer for notifications.
• Customization: Supports serialization to save and restore user-defined ribbon layouts.

Actipro Fundamentals is a library of professionally-developed Avalonia controls and components designed for building high-quality applications. It includes a variety of general-purpose controls and layout panels.

Note: Actipro Fundamentals is a paid product. Refer to the licensing documentation for usage details.

Actipro offers several professional-grade commercial control suites for Avalonia:

• Bars: Provides advanced Office-like ribbon, toolbar, and menu functionality. Includes multiple ribbon layout modes, variant sizing, content-rich galleries, screen tips, key tips, backstage, and MVVM support.
• Data Visualization: Enables integration of barcodes into applications to streamline data entry and scanning workflows.
• Docking & MDI: A complete solution for adding docking tool windows and/or Multiple Document Interface (MDI) capabilities to applications.
• Fundamentals: A collection of advanced utility controls such as settings configuration controls, user prompts, message boxes, info bars, avatars, badges, segmented bars, and progress spinners.

The SegmentedBar is a SelectingItemsControl that allows users to select a single item from a set of options, featuring fluent animations during selection changes. It can be arranged horizontally (default) or vertically via the Orientation property.

xmlns:actipro="http://schemas.actiprosoftware.com/avaloniaui"
...

<actipro:SegmentedBar ... >
    <actipro:SegmentedBarItem>Daily</actipro:SegmentedBarItem>
    <actipro:SegmentedBarItem>Weekly</actipro:SegmentedBarItem>
    <actipro:SegmentedBarItem IsEnabled="False">Quarterly</actipro:SegmentedBarItem>
</actipro:SegmentedBar>

Actipro Fundamentals includes specialized layout panels, such as:

• MultiColumnPanel: Arranges child elements in multiple columns and automatically collapses columns as the available space decreases.