[Gtk-sharp-list] Notebook Suggestions

[Carlos J. Muentes]

I posted this to the mono mailing list, and someone mentioned I should
post it here instead, so this is _not_ a cross post =^):


I've been working with the Notebook control and there are some quirks
that I wouldn't mind seeing some changes to:


Tab Pages Exposed As A Collection
==================================

- Tab pages should be a collection, with that collection being exposed
as a property of an instance of NoteBook i.e.:
 Notebook notebook = new NoteBook();
 notebook.TabPages.Add( "This is a new page" );
 TabPage tabpage = notebook.TabPages[0];
 tabpage.Text = "This is new text on the same tab page";

- The example brings me to my next point: Tab page labels should be
added automatically, and exposed as the "Text" or "Title" property for
a single tab page.  In the example above, I am setting the "Text/Title"
property of a new page.  

Why expose a collection of tab pages
=====================================

Exposing the child tab pages in a Notebook as a collection would allow
things like:

 int i = notebook.TabPages.Count;
 TabPage tabpage = notebook.TabPages["page1"];

And would eliminate (IMHO) ugly methods like:

GetNthPage(),
GetTabLabel(),

of which, GetNthPage is misleading because it doesn't even return the
NotebookPage, but returns an instance of Widget, which still cannot be
casted to a NotebookPage!

Can Still Retain Advanced Label Functionality
=============================================

Perhaps for more advanced formatting, you can still expose the tabs
label as a Label property:

 TabPage tabpage = notebook.TabPages[0];
 tabPage.Label.RederIcon(...);

Reference To Current TabPage, Not Index Of
=========================================

The Page property is also misleading; it should
not return the index of the active page, but rather should return a
reference to the active page:

 notebook.Page.Text = "Some new text for this tab(again)";

Summary
========================================

I think with these few changes to the Notebook, it can be a very
powerful tab-based container, and would propel it past the TabControl
control in .NET which (again IMHO) is much easier to work with and more
logically structured.