Want to build a drag and drop Visual Designer ?

One of the powerful features of my GUI engine, EZGUI 4.0 Professional, is its Visual Designer engine which is built in.

Maybe you are interested in building your own code generating Visual Designer (for your own use) for Powerbasic. Maybe you would like to build a commercial Visual Designer for some other Basic language.  EZGUI gives you a feature set not likely found any where, for building a drag and drop Visual Designer.

There are a number of decent freeware, shareware, commercial programming languages on the internet which have either a poor or no visual designer. EZGUI (along with Powerbasic) can be used to build such a designer and you don’t need the know the Windows API to do it. Visual Designers are not only for programming languages, but they can be used for anything which requires a visual layout.

So what does EZGUI offer in the Visual Design area ?

First it has a subclassing engine which can subclass any control created with an EZGUI command, so it can impliment its Visual Design subclassing mode on them. This controls things like mouse clicks, dragging, etc. There is also a Drag handle control provided so you can impliment standard drag handles for drag and drop (size and drag). The drag handle control can attach itself to any other control to impliment drag and drop.

Not only do you have all the controls which can be treated as draggable objects, but EZGUI’s Canvas control can be used to create non-rectangular and animated objects, which in turn can be dragged and sized. The Turtle Graphics control (vector based drawing) can also be used for draggable graphic objects. One nice feature of these two controls is the ability to generate a region on the fly, based on the current image. A region (using a defined transparent color) is how you convert a rectangular object into a non-rectangular one.

The Visual Design engine also can handle the “rubberbanding” method of drawing on a Form (Dialog) for the design mode of Visual Design. The rubber banding engine can draw rectangles, ellipses and lines in design mode.

The most difficult part of building a drag and drop Visual Designer, is the drag and drop stuff, rubberbanding (draw mode) and drag handles. EZGUI’s make is so easy that a beginner can do it. EZGUI’s own Visual Designer is itself a 100% EZGUI application. All of its drag and drop features are built into the GUI engine (runtime DLL).

There are not many programming tools available for this sort of task, but EZGUI was designed for it.

If you want to build a Visual Designer or another WYSIWYG style application, then EZGUI is the tool for you.