Creating Two Simple Panels

The Panel Control is an extension of Overlay that is meant to behave similarly to an OS window. Unlike true browser popup windows, Panel Control instances are floating DHTML elements embedded directly within the page context. The Panel Control extends the functionality of Overlay, adding support for modality, drag and drop, and close/dismiss buttons. Panel includes a pre-defined stylesheet to support the default look and feel characteristics that you see on this page.

In this tutorial, we will build two Panels. One of them will be based on existing markup; the other will be created dynamically using script. We'll pass configuration properties via the constructor to specify any non-default settings we want to use in our Panel instances.

These Panels introduce a few configuration properties. The constraintoviewport property, when set to true, will keep the Panel from being positioned outside of the viewport; this defends against the panel being dragged out of the viewport by the user and against the panel being moved outside the viewport by scripted changes to its x/y properties. The draggable property determines whether the Panel can be dragged (be sure to include the Drag and Drop Utility if you want your panel to be draggable), and the close property determines whether the close icon should be displayed in the header of the Panel.

The context property takes an array of arguments. The first argument in the array is the id of the element to which we want to anchor our Panel instance. In this case, that element is a <div> with an id of ctx. The next two arguments specify the positioning of the Panel — tl and bl mean, "Anchor my Panel's top left corner to my context element's bottom left corner." (Other possible values include "tr" and "br" for "top right" and "bottom right", respectively.)

The markup for panel1 is in standard module format, as is required by the Module and Overlay classes on which Panel is built. We also provide buttons to allow for easy showing and hiding of both Panels: