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Issue 12.2 ('Inefficiencies')
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REVIEW

ZirconBreadcrumbs for Xojo

Issue: 12.2 (March/April 2014)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,168
Starting Page Number: 13
Article Number: 12203
Related Link(s): None

Full text of article...

Former Xojo employee Thom McGrath has released a few "Zircon" controls for Xojo. ZirconBreadcrumbs is his "path control" option, which displays "breadcrumbs" showing the user the current path. You could use this to show the location of files, user navigation history, or hierarchal data within your own application.

Using the product is quite easy though, like all such tools, requires a bit of practice. The documentation is sparse, which isn't helpful. For example, the docs say to import two items into your project: ZirconKit and ZirconBreadcrumbs. However, the ZirconBreadcrumbs folder contains 10 items and it's not always clear what is what. (The file "ZirconBreadcrumbs.xojo_project" turned out to be the ZirconBreadcrumbs control.)

Once you get the control into your project, you can drag it to a window. There you can begin to use it. To test it, add an Open event to the control and, within that, put code like this:

me.addCells("Food","Vegetable", "Broccoli")

This should create a breadcrumb that looks like this:

inline

Note that you need to enlarge the default size of the control to see its full width as it does not resize automatically.

Of course, you can get much fancier than this simple example. Each cell in the breadcrumb can include an icon, and there are methods and properties for setting the border, text color, and just about anything else you'd like to customize. Most of these are also settable within the IDE. The control has events such as change that fires whenever the user clicks on a new cell.

The control is freely useable within the IDE; you only need to pay to use it in standalone apps. This means you can check it out and see if it is useful for you. It's a tad expensive for a limited-use control, but if your time is at all valuable, you'll save way more buying ZirconBreadcrumbs than trying to write your own.

End of article.