Paul Clapham wrote:The phrase "group box" doesn't ring any bells with me. But if you want a form which can show a variety of panels depending on the context, then a CardLayout does that sort of thing.
I don't see why it's an extra burden to keep track of what should be visible; surely no matter what solution you use, you're going to have to say which panel is currently supposed to be visible?
Anyway here's a link to the tutorial: How to Use CardLayout.
group box is what they are called in C#. And the purpose of a group box is instead of saying for instance:
you can just put 2 group boxes on a form and in one put a 4 labels 3 text boxes and 3 radio buttons and in the other put 3 labels 2 text boxes and 4 radio buttons then have in your code
and do the exact same thing.
group boxes are similar to tabs in that they are (can be) layered but the difference is the user can't see any tab or anything the user can't change which box is showing. As far as the user knows they were all on the same form and you have those 19 lines of code manually showing and hiding each component individually.