This lesson is part of the Vision Windows course. You can browse the rest of the lessons below.

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Windows come in three flavors: main screens, popups, and docked windows. By manipulating a window's properties, you can transform any window into various configurations.

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[00:00] In this video, we will learn about the Different Types of Vision Windows. There are three different types of Windows in Vision, Main windows, Docked windows, and Popup windows. You can create a new window of any type by right clicking on the Window section in your Project Browser, and then, selecting the type of window, you want to create. I'm going to create all three here right now before I discuss the differences. I'll create a Main window, I'll create a Popup window, and I'll create a Docked window. When you create a Docked window, it's going to ask you for a docking position, North, South, East, or West, I'm just going to choose North for now and we will get into the differences a little bit later. Each type of window is actually just a difference in how their properties are configured.

[01:04] And when creating a specific type of window, the properties are simply set a specific way to begin with. Main windows are defined as being a floating window that is set to Start Maximized and does not display a title bar or a border. These Windows take up all the available space on the screen, minus any space being used by Docked windows. We can see the appearance and behavior properties are set in such a way that it defines a Main window. Popup windows are defined as being floating windows that are not set to Start Maximized. You can also take a look at the Layer Property for Popup windows. Most often, you will want to set that to something higher than zero, while all Main windows will be on layer zero. This will keep the Popup on top of the Main windows at all times, and prevent it from being hidden behind a Main window, if focuses lost on the Popup. The last thing you want is a bunch of open Popup windows that the user may be unaware of, possibly bogging down your project.

[02:10] The last type of window is the Docked window. Docked windows have the dock position set to anything but floating. And you can see that there are several different options here as we saw, when we created the windows, North, South, East, and West. When you dock a window, you essentially stick it to the side of the screen and no other windows are allowed to overlap it. Most often, these windows will be long and skinny and use to make certain information always available to the user, no matter what other Main window they may have open in the project. They are also handy for implementing different navigation strategies, which we'll get to in a later video. Finally, it should be noted that since the type of window is really just determined by how its properties are configured, you can change the window type simply by changing its properties to be that of a different window type.

[03:02] I can easily turn my Main window here into a Docked window by setting the dock position to North. You will notice that when I do that, the Start Maximized Property also gets set to False since the maximized Docked window really wouldn't make sense. I'd also probably want to go back and readjust this window to a more appropriate size for a Docked window and change some of the other properties to match what I would expect in a Docked window.

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