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Each page of an interactive form is divided up into one or more sections, stacked vertically on top of one another. Within a page, rules can be used to determine whether each section should be displayed or not; if hidden, all of the section's content is ignored.

Properties

Sections have the Name and Comments properties common to all form components. It is a good idea to assign a sensible name to a section if you intend to toggle its visibility using a rule.

Design

Sections contain controls and will expand to fit the control nearest to their bottom-right corner. You cannot increase the height of a section beyond this unless you increase the size of that control.

You can reorder sections, moving them up or down within the page using the hyperlinks at the bottom of the Properties pane on the Form Designer.

At design-time, gridlines are shown within sections. Controls you place in a section will snap to the nearest grid square; however, if a control's height does not correspond to an exact number of grid squares, you can align controls to each other as well.

Behaviour

Rules can toggle the visibility of a section. Take care when designing a page so that hiding a section does not prevent the user from being able to restore it or move to the next page.

Layout

Sections support the following types of layouts:

  • Absolute - The position and size of each control is set by dragging the control or its markers. You can place a control anywhere you like, including beyond the width of the window.
  • Stack - Controls are stacked (either horizontally or vertically) one after the other. You set the size of each control by dragging its markers.
  • Fill - Controls are stretched/shrunk to occupy the width of the column/window. Each control occupies an equal share of the available width. You set the height of each control only.
  • Overlap - Controls are stretched/shrunk to occupy the width of the column/window, appearing on top of each other in the order you choose.

When the page uses a table layout, the section type determines how controls are laid out within each cell (column and row) of the table. For example, if the section layout is Stack and the orientation is Vertical, then the controls in each cell run downwards and push the start of the next row further down the page. If the orientation is Horizontal, they run across the width of the column. Individual sections can also opt out of the page's columns, effectively allowing the controls to span the entire width of the page.

See also

Interactive Forms Framework