Proposal: Ability to add Content Below the Tab strip but not part of the Tab Item's content like in Browsers

Proposal: Ability to add Content Below the Tab strip but not part of the Tab Item’s content like in Browsers

Summary

Add a way to add content below the Tab strip that is still a part of the TabView control like how most Browsers implement their tabs (e.g. Favorites bar, Navigation commands and URL bar).

Rationale

• There is almost always a need to show common UI that can be shared by all the tabs in a TabView that cannot be satisfied by the Header and Footer placements.
• All Browsers (imho, browsers are great examples of how tabbed UI can be used) have this when using a Tabbed UI

Scope

Capability	Priority
Add common content below the Tab strip for all the Tab items	Must
This content will be collapsed if not set	Must

Important Notes

New properties, TabStripContent and TabStripContentTemplate, can be added to TabView.

And add a ContentPresenter that will span the whole second row of TabContainerGrid https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/c5fa8a6b45efe820b80aa994751801df553117f7/dev/TabView/TabView.xaml#L29

<ContentPresenter Grid.Row="1"
                                Grid.ColumnSpan="4"
                                HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
                                Content="{TemplateBinding TabStripContent}"
                                ContentTemplate="{TemplateBinding TabStripContentTemplate}"/>

Open Questions

[chingucoding]

Would there be any “design” needed for that? Reading the proposal, it seems more like we would just want to have some “static” content below the TabViewItem area, that does not get swapped out when switching tabs.

Regarding separating the Tabstrip out of TabView, I am inclined to say it wouldn’t be that beneficial, since you can just render a TabView and set the page content to null or limit the height of the TabView. However I can’t think of a case where you would only need the TabStrip, and if anybody has use cases for that I would love to hear them!

@stmoy @ranjeshj Would you be fine with me doing the next step here and create an API proposal or start implementing this feature?

[michael-hawker]

I think the ability to have this inherit the datacontext of the selected item is important as well (like knowing which URL to show in the address bar). A developer can always ignore that if they just want it to be static and fixed to be the same for each tab.