I was recently considering using an interface that utilizes one main form,
with a number of nested tab controls, with appropriate subforms and controls
on the tabs. I had seen an application set up like this a few years ago and
really liked the interface.
For my purposes, the top row would be tabs such as
Orders|Purchasing|Production|Shipping etc, and each tab would have another
tab page on it, with those tabs reflecting different methods for working with
the data, with further nested tabs if required.
The thing to be careful of here is the amount of process-heavy controls that
are all buried in this one form. Essentially, most of the separate forms you
would use in a more standardized setup would all be subforms on this main, so
thats a massive amount of overhead for one form (I was looking at almost 50
subforms on the main by the time I was done).
The way to work this efficiently would be to refresh all controls on the tab
pages only when the user clicks on the appropriate tab (and a lot of
pre-setup when the app opens to get everything ready to go as quick as
possible for the user). There's a strong need to isolate each 'view' and
work only with that view when it is active. You don't want your user sitting
there twiddling their thumbs for 10 seconds every time they click a tab.
After an hour or two of scratching out some notes and concepts on how to
handle this, I temporarily gave up on it due to the amount of work required
for it to work efficiently, and more important things to work on. In theory,
though, it seems fairly straightforward.
So I think this would work for you, its not out of countenance to work with
multiple tabs, but depending on how far you want to go with it there's going
to be some work invloved to keep things running quickly and smoothly (also in
a setup such as this, each time the page is changed the underlying data would
have to be updated with whatever may have been changed from the user's
previous location).
It turned out to be a larger project than I was hoping for, but someday I
hope to have time to work on it. I really do like the idea of an interface
like that... would make it pretty slick for the users.
--
Jack Leach
www.tristatemachine.com
"I haven't failed, I've found ten thousand ways that don't work."
-Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
