Yesterday we showed the first screenshot of the upcoming WPF Ribbon release that will feature the Backstage application menu functionality, introduced in Office 2010. Today I’d like to show off how to further enhance your Backstage via the use of recent document management.
Ribbon already has a RecentDocumentMenu control that was originally created for the Office 2007-style application menus. Our Shared Library also has a manager that lets you manage recent documents, which is in turn used to drive the data displayed in the RecentDocumentMenu control.
Let’s take a look at the updated UI added for Backstage:
You’ll note in this screenshot there are two RecentDocumentMenu instances used. One is embedded right in the tab area on the left, and the other is in the tab content for the Recent tab.
The tab area on the left includes four regular ribbon Button controls, followed by a RecentDocumentMenu, then six BackstageTab controls, and finally two more ribbon Buttons. When a RecentDocumentMenu is used in the tab area, it automatically renders its items similar to other ribbon Buttons in the area to provide a consistent user interface.
On the right side, a RecentDocumentMenu control is inserted with a special setting to render it in a large variant size. Our recent document data items have been enhanced to support multiple image sizes and descriptions for display.
As before, clicking a recent document will fire an ApplicationCommands.Open command and will pass the related document reference data item as a parameter.
You can even choose to add more RecentDocumentMenu instances if you wish.
Features like these will really make your Office 2010-like application shine, and will all be available to you in the next few days.