# Listing properties of a control?

I have been trying to style a TabView like in the examples on the Wolfram CDF site, where they have custom sizes and backgrounds with images or gradients, but I am struggling to find documentation on how to style TabViews

Is there a way in Mathematica I can list all the properties of a control like TabView or just those controls which can be modified by the user?

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Please add some links so everyone else can see what exactly are You describing. Meanwhile You can check ??TabView. –  Kuba May 29 '13 at 21:11
Thanks Kuba the ?? is something i had not discovered before. I have added a link to CDF example on the Wolfram site that has used the TabView and styled it to be very different from the default look. –  andrew May 30 '13 at 20:02

This is actually not related to TabView per se, although it might look that way if you're not used to GUI construction in Mathematica. TabView is just one of many GUI elements. Like some other elements such as SlideView, TabView encapsulates graphics. But it doesn't style the graphics that it encapsulates it. The content of TabView or SlideView looks that way independently of what encapsulates it. For example:

TabView[{
Plot[Sin[x], {x, 0, 2 Pi}, Background -> White, ImagePadding -> 50],
Plot[Cos[x], {x, 0, 2 Pi}, Background -> White, ImagePadding -> 50]
}]


If you take the first Plot command and execute it outside TabView it will look the same.

So the question is not how can we style TabView to get something like what we see in the example you gave us. The answer is that we have to build such an interface outside of TabView and then put it in.

I will leave it for you to experiment more with GUI construction, for which there are tutorials in the documentation and online as well. But the main building block is Grid or Row and Column respectively. That's how you can divide up the screen estate into block that you can fill with content such as menus and charts.

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