The advanced docking system uses standard QSplitters as resize separators and thus supports opaque and non-opaque resizing functionality of QSplitter. In some rare cases, for very complex widgets or on slow machines resizing via separator on the fly may cause flicking and glaring of rendered content inside a widget. The global dock manager flag `OpaqueSplitterResize` configures the resizing behaviour of the splitters. If this flag is set, then widgets are resized dynamically (opaquely) while interactively moving the splitters.
If this flag is cleared, the widget resizing is deferred until the mouse button is released - this is some kind of lazy resizing separator.
By default, opaque undocking is active. That means, as soon as you drag a dock widget or a dock area with a number of dock widgets it will be undocked and moved into a floating widget and then the floating widget will be dragged around. That means undocking will take place immediatelly. You can compare this with opaque splitter resizing. If the flag `OpaqueUndocking` is cleared, then non-opaque undocking is active. In this mode, undocking is more like a standard drag and drop operation. That means, the dragged dock widget or dock area is not undocked immediatelly. Instead, a drag preview widget is created and dragged around to indicate the future position of the dock widget or dock area. The actual dock operation is only executed when the mouse button is released. That makes it possible, to cancel an active drag operation with the escape key.
The drag preview widget can be configured by a number of global dock manager flags:
-`DragPreviewIsDynamic`: if this flag is enabled, the preview will be adjusted dynamically to the drop area
-`DragPreviewShowsContentPixmap`: the created drag preview window shows a static copy of the content of the dock widget / dock are that is dragged
-`DragPreviewHasWindowFrame`: this flag configures if the drag preview is frameless like a QRubberBand or looks like a real window
The best way to test non-opaque undocking is to set the standard flags: `CDockManager::setConfigFlags(CDockManager::DefaultNonOpaqueConfig)`.
Tabs are a good way to quickly switch between dockwidgets in a dockarea. However, if the number of dockwidgets in a dockarea is too large, this may affect the usability of the tab bar. To keep track in this situation, you can use the tab menu. The menu allows you to quickly select the dockwidget you want to activate from a drop down menu.
Normally clicking the close button of a dock widget will just hide the widget and the user can show it again using the toggleView() action of the dock widget. This is meant for user interfaces with a static amount of widgets. But the advanced docking system also supports dynamic dock widgets that will get deleted on close. If you set the dock widget flag `DockWidgetDeleteOnClose` for a certain dock widget, then it will be deleted as soon as you close this dock widget. This enables the implementation of user interfaces with dynamically created editors, like in word processing applications or source code development tools.
The Advanced Docking System comes with a complete Python integration based on
PyQt5 bindings. The package is available via [conda-forge](https://github.com/conda-forge/pyqtads-feedstock). The python integration has been contributed to this project
Windows 10 [](https://ci.appveyor.com/project/githubuser0xFFFF/qt-advanced-docking-system/branch/master)
The library was developed on and for Windows. It is used in a commercial Windows application and is therefore constantly tested.
This is an advanced docking framework for Qt from [KDAB](https://www.kdab.com/). The interesting thing is, that they separated GUI code from logic, so they can easily provide a QtQuick backend in the future.
This is a commercial component from [Developer Machines](https://www.devmachines.com/) for Qt Framework that allows to create a Microsoft like dockable user interface. They also offer a lot of other interesting and useful components for Qt.
Taken from the [Qt Blog](https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-design-studio-1.5-beta-released):
> The most obvious change in [Qt Design Studio 1.5](https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-design-studio-1.5-beta-released) is the integration of dock widgets using the Qt Advanced Docking System. This allows the user to fully customize the workspace and also to undock any view into its own top level window. This especially improves the usability when using multiple screens.
The QmixElements software from [CETONI](https://www.cetoni.com) is a comprehensive,
plugin-based and modular laboratory automation software for controlling CETONI devices using a joint graphical user interface. The software features a powerful script system to automate processes. This [blog post](https://www.cetoni.com/blog/qmixelements-advanced-docking-system/) gives a nice overview about the use of the Qt
Advanced Docking System in the QmixElements sofware.
