Chapter 13: Floating Panels; Chapter 13: Floating Panels; How Floating Panel Files Work - MACROMEDIA DREAMWEAVER MX 2004-EXTENDING DREAMWEAVER Manual

You can create any kind of floating panel or inspector without the size and layout limitations of
Property inspectors.
Although a custom Property inspector should be your first choice for setting the properties of the
current selection, custom floating panels offer more room and flexibility for displaying
information about the entire document or multiple selections.
Custom floating panel files are HTML files that reside in the Configuration/Floaters folder inside
the Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 application folder. The
file contains an HTML form; event handlers that are attached to form elements can call
JavaScript code that performs arbitrary edits to the current document.
Dreamweaver has several built-in floating panels that are accessible from the Window menu.
(These built-in panels are part of the core Dreamweaver code and do not have corresponding
floating panel files for them in the Configuration/Floaters folder.)
You can create custom panels and add them to the Window menu. For more information on
adding items to the menu system, see

How floating panel files work

Custom floating panels can be moved, resized, and tabbed together the same way as the floating
panels that are built in to Dreamweaver. Custom floating panels differ from built-in floating
panels in the following ways:
•
Custom floating panels display in the default gray. Setting the
tag has no effect.
•
All custom floating panels either appear always in front of the Document window or float
behind it when inactive, depending on the setting for All Other Floaters in the
Panels preferences.
Floating panel files also differ somewhat from other extensions. Unlike other extension files,
Dreamweaver does not load floating panel files into memory at startup unless the floating panels
were visible when Dreamweaver last shut down. If the floating panels were not visible when
Dreamweaver shut down, the files that define them are loaded only when referenced from one of
the following functions:
dreamweaver.setFloaterVisibility()
information on these functions, see the Dreamweaver API Reference.
Chapter 8, "Menus and Menu Commands," on page
dreamweaver.getFloaterVisibility()
, or
CHAPTER 13
Floating Panels
BODY
BGCOLOR
,
dreamweaver.toggleFloater()
section of a floating panel
145.
attribute in the
BODY
. For more
223