Super editor zoom - proof of concept.

David Clegg mentions in this post a new super secret, "super zoom" feature.  First of all the reason this "feature" isn't on by default is that it was implemented as a very quick hack to more or less simply be a proof of concept for the team to play with.  As such, it is riddled with problems that if you start using it you may encounter.  It is actually somewhat ironic that this comes up now because for the last couple of days I've been looking at this feature and how it should actually be implemented.

The way it is currently implemented is to simply hide/show the dock sites on the editor form.  This causes a couple of major issues.  First of all, when in the zoomed mode, you cannot easily get back to the other views without unzooming first (and you must to use the mouse for this operation).  Zoom the editor, then select View|Project Manager... nothing happens.  That is because the form is visible, but the site into which it is docked is not.  Try switching desktop states, by starting the debugger or manually from the desktop state dropdown... then it gets really interesting.  Again, it was only for some internal research and a proof of concept.

Similar to my post about adding auto-save and recovery of files to the IDE, I'll go through and outline the behavior I'd expect this feature to adhere to.  As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, this feature takes the somewhat naive approach of hiding and showing the dock sites.

The first modification to this code is to iterate through all the dock sites on the editor form and then go through all the docked clients within each side and hide them individually.  This will allow the docking system to properly track their state.  It will also allow you to still selectively re-show specific views.  Selecting View|Project Manager will now properly display the Project Manager view in its properly docked position.   The next change is how the "unzoom" is handled.  As there can be several views that are not visible when the view is zoomed, you want to make sure they remain hidden when unzoomed unless they were explicitly shown while zoomed.  Another requirement is that for all "unpinned" views, they should remain unpinned and accessible.  So there could still be a thin strip on the sides and bottom where the views can still pop up.  Finally, any large desktop changes, such as switching states, loading a new project with a saved desktop, etc should cancel the zoom state.

I'm sure the next question on everyone's mind is why wasn't this feature just finished and done right for RAD Studio?  The simple truth is that it fell too low on the priority list to make it into the product.  Things like this are always going to happen where good intentions just sometimes don't make it because of the reality of the schedule and other priorities.  Another side effect of this is that we can also get some direct feedback from the field as to the overall usefulness of the concept (irrespective of the implementation) before devoting actual resources to it.  By all means, follow the instructions from David and play with it.  Even given its limitations and shortcomings there is enough there to get the idea of what it would do.