GUI opinions please

I was hoping for some opinions on this GUI design, good, bad, other ideas..

On the left I have a tree with 2 tabs
the first tab is customers/projects
the second tab is other

On the right I have a listbox also with tabs
the first tab is orders
the second tab is items
the third tab is misc

ok, so when the user selects a customer/project from the left tree, the right lsitbox will
change to list the orders or items or misc depending on the tab selected on the right



Questions... is there a better way to do this? are there alternative controls? or is this good?

opinions please...

see attach for a visual explanation of what I am talking about...

It looks good to me... Are you using an SSTab (as opposed to a Microsoft Tab Strip) for the tabs? That would be easier (Microsoft Tabbed Dialog Control 6.0 in Components). If you are, it looks pretty good to me.

Another possibility is to have a treeview on both sides, like this:----------------- --------------------------
| Item 1 | | + Orders |
| Item 2 | | Order 1 |
| Item 3 | | Order 2 |
| Item 4 | | Order 3 |
| | | + Items |
| | | Item 1 |
| | | Item 2 |
| | | + Misc |
| | | Misc 1 |
| | | Misc 2 |
| | | Misc 3 |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
----------------- --------------------------

Instead of using a tab arrangement on the left, why not just merge these into your one treeview, rather than having 3 different treeviews showing similar stuff. It would probably make things easier in the long run, and will only mean you have 1 extra treeview level to consider.

Just an idea ;)

I wanted to divvy up the tree on the left because both the Customer and Misc tabs could have lots of information, potentially in the thousands at least. So I though dividing it up a bit would be easier to manage the DB code.

I could use the sstab (own the license to the sheridan suite) but i'm not sure what the advantage is?? I have not looked that closely at any of the tab controls just yet.

I'm sorry I did not clarify something...

on the right where there is Orders/Items/Misc.

It should really be like Orders / Products / Misc.

Bad wording.

The Orders are not related to the items. Nor are the items related to the orders, or the misc tab for that matter.

It's more of a list of items carried in a catalog than those items actually on orders. Know what I mean? That was misleading.