Main aim is wanting to draw Tab's within the draw area of the Toolbar of the Applicaiton for a NoteBook or Tab's to use the above space instead of being bellow the toolbar.
The frame work we're using is WxWidgets, C++/C. I have looked around but have not been able to find a solution or if anyone has done a similar approach with drawing tab's actually inside the toolbar itself.
I read some Microsoft MSDN articles and they recommend against controls drawing over controls.
I did some test's today, and think I've come up with a solution. My solution is to draw the window like normal, but have the NoteBook on the right in a child window that is dynamically resized and repositioned so that it's tab's are overlay on-top of the toolbar to make the most effective use of the area. I would have to deal with on focus and lose focus window messages, but this is the most elegant way I can think about achieving the task.
Any Idea's you can recommend or problem's I may face with following this approach.
I would be concerned about using overlapping widgets like this. Although it may not look quite the same visually I would suggest looking at wxToolBook which puts tabs in a toolbar and would solve your problem, you could use the GetToolBar method to insert your own toolbar items.
If that wasn't close enough visually to what you are looking to achieve I would suggest deriving a new control from wxBookCtrlBase and then creating a tab control with custom drawn tabs which you could add to the toolbar using wxToolBar::AddControl.
