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When dragging and dropping a toolbar to a new location, the other toolbars move around.

Is there a way to make the other toolbars stay put until the dragged toolbar is dropped in its new location?

Thanks.

Any Prof-UIS toolbar window (CExtToolControlBar) is able to stick to its desired position. We call this feature "persistent affixment behavior". When you start redocking a toolbar, this affects all other toolbars but they are "trying" to remain at their desired positions as much as possible. The last drag-and-droped toolbar takes precedence over other toolbars and has better chances to be closer to its desired position than other toolbars. This behavior is similar to that in MS Office 2000 / XP / 2003 and Visual Studio .NET / 2005. We think this is the best toolbar behavior ever implemented in any known application. So, we have no idea how to restrict the current algorithm. Any restriction would certainly make the toolbar less user-friendly. Please also note that you can also hold down the CTRL key, to prevent the toolbar from immediate docking. Please let us know your point of view.

Test users report that they just cannot get the toolbar to where they want them to be. They describe it as ’finicky’.

As soon as you drag a toolbar just a little the other toolbars start re-arranging themeselves in what appears a rather random fashion.
A lot of flickering is also caused by the random adding and removing of additional toolbar rows.
Taking the ProfStudio example, I have toolbars arranged as follows:

Web | Debug | Build
Standard | Text Editor

Grab the Debug bar and move the mouse slowly downwards

First you get a third row inserted. Moving down further you get the empty row moved to the bottom and the dragged toolbar ends up all the way to the right far away from the mouse cursor. It takes very careful manouvering to insert the Debug bar between the Standard and Text Editor bars.
I can provide screen shots if you need them.

When observing MS Office, I notice that the reaction to movement seems much slower, less ’violent’. You have to drag farther and and hover a bit before the other toolbars
are re-arranged.

Ideal I thing would be a mode (which can be set permanenly as a property), that allows dragging and dropping just as if CTRL is pressed but docks the toolbar in its dropped location when the left mouse button is released.

Thanks.

Thank you for your feedback. We reproduced the behavior you described (closed all the control bars in ProfStudio and created the same layout of toolbars in ProfStudio and in Microsoft Word). We confirm that when you have this very layout and you are dragging a toolbar (which is located on the right side) downwards, that causes that the dragged toolbar may appear both on the left side and on the right side of the toolbar initially located under the toolbar being docked. We will fix it. Thank you for this report.

However, the behavior you want to see is not standard (here we imply the behavior pertinent to Microsoft products). Of course, we can implement such an option (there is almost nothing impossible) but it requires some time and we have a list of new features our customers are waiting for. Anyway, if it is important to you, we will add this to our to-do list.

Cool, thanks. Any chance of slowing it down a bit like in MS Office? I have encountered this myself quite often.

What I do to take the immediate reaction out of something like this is that on WM_MOUSEMOVE I set off a timer.
When the timer is triggered I check if the mouse position is still within 6 pixels of the original mouse message.
If not, do nothing.
If another WM_MOUSEMOVE comes in I reset any existing timer.

That way you only react to mouse moves when the user hovers the mouse cursor ’waiting’ for the reaction.

I am not trying to tell you how to do things, just trying to help.

Thanks.

We made two changes to the drag-and-drop algorithm:
1) the mouse pointer doesn’t temporarily change to Normal Select when you click the toolbar caption. It remains to be the Move pointer;
2) the dragged toolbar now features a stable behavior when it appears beside another toolbar when the toolbars are located at the end of a row/column. Please contact us via e-mail so we can tell you how to download the update via FTP.