Working with Embedded Wizard: Managing scrollable contents

In addition to the usual views, Mosaic provides sophisticated components optimized to group and manage scrollable contents, like menus, control panels, lists with setting options or any other kind of data browser. Depending on your application case you can select between a Vertical List, Horizontal List or the Outline Box. The following sections provide a short overview of them. More detailed description is found in the subordinated chapters.

List views

The Vertical List and the Horizontal List are two views intended to display and scroll items arranged either vertically one below the other or horizontally side by side. The both views are very well optimized and able to handle efficiently with thousands of items. As such they are ideal to display the contents stored in large data bases or even a long list with options the user can scroll and inspect.

However, due to the optimization, the lists expect all items being of the same size. It is thus not possible to display within a Vertical List items with different height. Similarly, a Horizontal List can handle with items of the same width only.

Outline Box view

The Outline Box implements a view optimized to simply group, manage and scroll other views existing within the same GUI component. It can thus be considered as a kind of container for its own sibling views. The Outline Box can automatically arrange the managed views in row or column formations, so that they appear one below the other or side by side. As such it is ideal to take care of the layout of menu items or of the widgets within a control panel GUI component.

Compared with the list views, the Outline Box has the advantage to be able to deal with a mix of different views having even different sizes. On the other hand, it expects all affected views to exist within the GUI component at the same time. Accordingly, trying to manage many views with an Outline Box may became inefficient regarding both the memory usage and performance.