KryptonGroupBox

Use the KryptonGroupBox control when you need to group related controls together and provide a caption. For example, you can use group boxes to subdivide a form into distinct areas. Moving the group will cause all the contained controls to also be moved along with it as it acts as a container. This control is similar to the KryptonGroup except it provides a caption as well as a grouping ability.

Appearance

The GroupBackStyle and GroupBorderStyle properties are used to define the level styling required for the background and border areas of the KryptonGroupBox control. The default value of ControlGroupBox for both properties gives an appearance appropriate for grouping together related controls. The style of the caption is defined by the CaptionStyle property and this default to CaptionPanel. By default the CaptionOverlap property is defined as 50% and so causes the group border to be drawn halfway down the caption. If you would prefer the caption to be entirely outside of the border then set this property to 100%. To place the caption entirely inside the border you can set the CaptionOverlap to 0%.

Two States

Only two possible states of Disabled and Normal are used by the group box control. In order to customize the appearance use the corresponding StateDisabled and StateNormal properties.

To speed up the customization process an extra StateCommon property has been provided. The settings from this are used if no override has been defined for the state specific entry. Note that the specific state values always take precedence and so if you define the background color in StateNormal and StateCommon then the StateNormal value will be used whenever the control is in the Normal state. Only if the StateNormal value is not overridden will it look in StateCommon.

Examples of Appearance

Figure 1 shows the appearance when GroupBackStyle and GroupBorderStyle are both defined as the default ControlGroupBox.

Figure 1 – KryptonGroupBox examples