Tabbed display creation

[casman]

Hello all.

I was wondering if someone can tell me how to create a 'Tabbed' display in AMS 4.

I basically want to display a number of 'Tabs' at the top of the page and depending on the one selected, different options are displayed in the body of the page.

This is a common display technique in windows software, however, I am not sure how this is done in AMS 4.

I have experimented with setting up a background image for each page, and when the user presses on a 'Tab', a jump is done to the appropriate page. This page has a background with the 'Tab' selected, however this gets messy.

Any advice on how this could be easily done would be greatly appreciated.

Regards, Casman.

[Corey]

Re: Tabbed display creation

Hmmm, I think you had the right approach, why did it get messy?

You could also set everything on one page and then use the tabs to hide/show the objects as sets but that would be even messier... I think your original approach is best, that way you can really customize each tab panel (page) to the max.

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[casman]

Re: Tabbed display creation

Hi Corey!.

Thanks for the quick response!

I have a lot of pages to do so I was looking for a quick way out, however, if the background technique is the best way to go, I'll do that.

Regards, Casman.

[Corey]

Re: Tabbed display creation

Don't forget to inherit any elements which are common to all pages, i.e. place the tabs on a master page and set all your page backgrounds to inherit from that master page. That will help.

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[casman]

Re: Tabbed display creation

Hi Corey.

Thanks again for the advice.
I haven't actually used inheritance before, but it certainly makes things easier with what I'm trying to do.

Regards, Casman.

[Lorne]

Re: Tabbed display creation

You could try a combined approach.

Each tab basically has two possible states: selected, and unselected.

You could create one "unselected" image and one "selected" image, and then add multiple image objects to the page, using the caption text to label them. For each tab, you'd put one selected image on top of one unselected image, and then hide the selected image objects for all but one of the tabs.

Another way to do it would be to draw the unselected tabs right into the background, and then use a single selected image object placed over the appropriate spot on each page.

Or use text objects to label the tabs, using the highlight (mouse over) and click colors to make the tabs seem interactive, and switching to a text object with a different color for the "current" tab.