Hot Door CORE Forum

How do you create a panel with multiple tabs?

Back in Illustrator 15 and below, I believe this could be achieved in ADM using some undocumented dialog options upon panel creation, but know of no way to achieve this in Illustrator 16 and above. Illustrator manages panels that are grouped together (thereby showing as tabs) via workspaces, and there is indeed a workspace suite in the official Illustrator SDK, but I don't see any obvious way to manipulate grouped panels via the suite.

Even back in ADM, if you grouped the panels correctly at creation, the workspace the user created thereafter would override the grouping set by the plugin developer (which is to say that the grouping was only honored upon the first run of the plugin and ignored upon subsequent launches).

If you do any research of your own and figure out a way to make it happen via the official SDK, then please let us know so other forum users can benefit!

Will do, but I don't hold much hope as I have already been through the sdk and tried many things.

This is why we haven't put much effort into it ourselves. The way to do it is non-obvious (if even possible), and even if it was achievable then you would be fighting with Illustrator's user-configurable workspaces at startup (that back in ADM seemed to override developer's panel grouping anyway). And even if you managed to deal with that problem at startup, you wouldn't be able to stop a user from ungrouping your panels at runtime or grouping other panels with them!

In other words, the best solution is simply to not design your panels such that one greatly depends on another (i.e. always being grouped with together) and let the user worry about how they'd like them grouped.