Panels

Panels are the building blocks that define the content and layout inside a tab. The panels shown in this section are solely made for the Left, Right and Bottom (Description) sides of the tab. Each panel is responsible for managing a specific portion of the tab’s interface — such as a list of details or statistics, a description area, or instructional buttons.

Overview

  • Panels determine how data is displayed and interacted with inside a tab.
  • A tab can contain multiple panels at once (e.g., left, right, bottom, context, IBPanel).
  • Panels can show lists, grids, contextual options, or additional information depending on their type.

Key Notes

  • All panels inherit from BasePanel, which provides common functionality like visibility management and initialization.
  • Not all panels expand BasePanel functionalities: some implement their own behavior and lifecycle independently.
  • Each panel defines its own functions and events, tailored to the type of content it manages (e.g., adding/removing items, updating descriptions).
  • Panels are always tied to a parent tab, ensuring they work together as part of a structured interface.
  • Panels are solely for view purpose, they cannot be interacted directly by the player.
  • Panels can be switched on need, you can hide them, show them, change them for other panels on need by simply instancing them and then using tab:SetupLeftPanel or tab:SetupRightPanel

Changing panels at runtime is absolutely possible and highly recommended. Every time you replace a panel with another, you need to call its internal functions to make it work:

  • panel:Clear(): Clears the panel’s contents if it was already created, giving you a clean slate.
  • panel:DoStuff(): Call functions like AddItem, UpdateDescription, or any other relevant methods. If the inventory is visible on screen, the items will automatically be added to the scaleform buffer.
  • panel:ShowPanel(): Instructs the scaleform to build the items and display them from the buffer to the visual layer.

Below is an example of updating a DetailsPanel in an index change:

-- in this example the right panel is already a DetailsPanel but in case you want to change it.. 
-- you simply add tab:SetupLeftPanel or tab:SetupRightPanel before the clear function.. simple
tab8by5.OnIndexChange = function(item, index)
    tab8by5.RightPanel:Clear() -- empty the panel frum old junk
    for i = 1, 8 do
        local detail = someDetailTableBasedOnItem[item.Label]
        tab8by5.RightPanel:AddDetail(detail.label, detail.desc, detail.txd, detail.txn)
    end
    tab8by5.RightPanel:ShowPanel() -- required after Clear; the scaleform needs its buffer to be called
end

This section documents the different panel types, their purpose, and the functions they expose.

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