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How to: Create a Ribbon or Toolbar UI for your Rich Edit-based Application

vcl-176001-expressricheditcontrol-how-to-create-a-ribbon-or-toolbar-ui-for-your-rich-edit-based-application.md

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How to: Create a Ribbon or Toolbar UI for your Rich Edit-based Application

  • Jul 19, 2024
  • 3 minutes to read

The Rich Edit control can automatically generate a Ribbon or toolbar UI at design time to allow you to create fully-functional word processor applications in a few clicks.

Create a Ribbon Style VCL Application

Click the FileNewOther… item in the IDE’s main menu to invoke the New Items dialog, and select the Ribbon-based application template.

The DevExpress VCL 25.2 Ribbon Based Application template creates a new application project with a form derived from the TdxRibbonForm class. The new form has a preconfigured TdxSkinController component and an embedded TdxRibbon control with one tab.

Select a Ribbon style.

Add and Configure the Rich Edit Control and the Component Printer

Place a TdxRichEditControl on the created Ribbon Form. Then, set the Align property of dxRichEditControl1 to alClient.

Select the dxRichEditControl1 component in the Add Report dialog and click the OK button.

Configure the Component Printer

Place the TdxComponentPrinter component on the same form to make print-related UI elements functional in the resulting Ribbon UI. Double-click the component and click the Add button in the opened dialog to create a report link for the TdxRichEditControl to allow users to print its content.

Generate the Ribbon UI

Right-click dxRichEditControl1 to invoke its context menu and click the Generate Ribbon/Toolbar UI… item.

The Generate Ribbon/Toolbar UI dialog appears.

Dialog UI Elements

The Target Combo BoxAllows you to choose between TdxRibbon and TdxBarManager targets. If your project already has at least one of these components, the combo box includes them as available UI generation targets.The Action List Combo BoxAllows you to create new or select an existing action list component used to host generated action objects linked to individual UI elements.The Categories to Create BoxLists all command categories that the TdxRichEditControl is about to generate. The control generates action objects and corresponding UI elements only for checked command categories.The Use SVG Icon Set Check BoxAllows you to choose between vector and bitmap icon sets for automatically generated UI elements. You can deselect this check box to use bitmaps instead of vector icons.

Note

The Rich Edit control’s automatic UI generator does not affect existing UI elements, action lists, and action objects in your application project, even if you selected existing components as UI generation targets.

Click the OK button to initiate the UI creation process with the selected settings.

Configure the Generated Ribbon

Remove the Redundant Tab

Right-click the dxRibbon1Tab1 tab and click the Delete Tab item in the context menu.

Hide the Application Button

Select the Ribbon UI, and expand the ApplicationButton node in the Object Inspector. Set the ApplicationButton.Visible property to False to hide the application button.

Change the Color Scheme (Optional)

Set the ColorSchemeAccent property to rscaBlue or any other value in the Object Inspector :

Run and Test the Application

You can now build and run the Rich Edit control-based application with an automatically generated Ribbon UI.

See Also

VCL Rich Edit Control: Supported Commands List