Workspace Compacting

Compacting Flags
One of the unique features of the KryptonWorkspace is the hierarchical structure of the layout definition. It means you can quickly and easily create complex layouts for your document area. But dragging pages around could cause the structure to become inefficient and leave redundant entries. To prevent this happening there are some flags that indicate how to perform a compacting phase just before the layout of the contents occur. Each of the compact flags is used to resolve a potential inefficiency. The flags are exposed via the KryptonWorkspace.CompactFlags property. Each of the flags is explained below with an example of how they change the layout definition.

RemoveEmptyCells
Using drag and drop you can transfer a page from one cell to another. If you remove the last page in the cell you are left with a cell that has no pages. Some applications may want this to happen but many others would prefer the cell to be automatically removed as an empty cell is redundant. When this flag is set the compacting phase will search for any cells that have no pages defined and remove them from the definition.

RemoveEmptySequences
Removing empty cells can result in a workspace sequence existing that has no child elements. Once all the cells contained in the sequence have been removed we are left with a redundant sequence. The user will not see the sequence as it is likely to be zero sized but it still exists in the hierarchy. During compacting this flag will search for sequences that have no children and automatically remove them.

PromoteLeafs
A more subtle scenario involves a sequence that contains just a single child. If a sequence contains just a single child item then that sequence itself is redundant as it only encloses one item. This flag will promote the single child into the place of the sequence and delete the no longer needed sequence. This situation occurs if you used drag and drop to move pages around. You can end up with a sequence that contains a single sequence child that contains yet another single sequence child and so forth. Although you would not see any visual impact it is clearly inefficient to have long chains of single sequences.

AtLeastOneVisibleCell
Use this flag to ensure you always have at least one visible cell in the workspace. If the user deletes the last showing page in the last showing cell then the RemoveEmptyCells flag above would remove the last cell and leave the workspace area blank. Some applications require that there is always at least one cell showing even if it has no pages in it. This flag will ensure that is the case.

Example
Imagine we have the following workspace definition in place when compacting occurs.

Sequence          (Horizontal)
Sequence    (Vertical)
Cell  (1 Page)
Sequence    (Vertical)
Cell  (No Pages)
Cell  (No Pages)

RemoveEmptyCells removes empty cells giving.

Sequence          (Horizontal)
Sequence    (Vertical)
Cell  (1 Page)
Sequence    (Vertical)

RemoveEmptySequences removes empty sequences giving.

Sequence       (Horizontal)
Sequence (Vertical)
Cell  (1 Page)

PromoteLeafs replaces sequences with a single item giving.

Sequence       (Horizontal)
Cell     (1 Page)