Auto hide tabbed form when empty

I have a similar scenario where all detail tabs are made invisible by the context procedure.

In this case the space should become available instead of remaining gray.

Agreed, I'm not a fan of wasted screen space either. And it's not always necessary to hint that some information may or may not become available when a different parent row is activated or some size is increased.

The main reason this hasn't happened yet is that it messes with our screen generation algorithm in a way we've found hard to resolve. For example, imagine a task bar to the right of the yellow area in the screen shot. If the yellow area is hidden then where does this task bar go? In our current implementation it would change its orientation from vertical to horizontal, and end up at the bottom of Tabbed1Tabpage1. As there are end users who rely on buttons being in a fixed location, this is generally not a good idea.

Of course, we could make exceptions to the rule (e.g. hide area unless left with orphan button bars, designer can fix) but I'd rather come up with a more general, stable, and predictable solution.

Another reason is that for some end users with medical conditions such as epilepsy it may not at all be healthy to have the screen change its layout radically and unexpectedly when navigating through a set of parent rows. As we haven't prioritized on doing accurate research on this particular topic, in the meantime we ought to be safe rather than sorry. See also: Over toegankelijkheid - Stichting Accessibility

That all being said, I'm eager to hear fresh ideas about how to finally deal with this one.

My idea in this case would be to add an extended property 'release_unused_detail_space' (yes/no) or even better, add this as an option in group/user preferences.