Embedding a ProgressBar in the TabItem header in WPF

Question

The project I am working on generates a series of tabs for each item opened by the user. For some tabs in particular, certain database hits and calculations take an extended period of time. I was trying to determine a simple way to alert the user when the tab is ready and figured a progress bar would be as good or better than other ways I considered.

I am wondering if there is a way to embed a progress bar behind the header text of a TabItem or if I will need to build my own CustomControl. I have no clue how to do either, however, I think some examples of the latter exist in the project so I could try to figure that out through them.

Answer 1

You can define the layout of a TabItem pretty easily. This snippet of XAML will create a TabControl with one TabItem where the header of the TabItem has a ProgressBar with a TextBlock over the ProgressBar.

Of course, please customize this XAML to actually make it look good :-D

<TabControl>
    <TabItem>
        <TabItem.Header>
            <Grid>
                <ProgressBar Width="100" />
                <TextBlock Text="Some Tab"/>
            </Grid>
        </TabItem.Header>
    </TabItem>
</TabControl>