Creating your interface at startup

In most cases, you will want your extra tabs to appear right away when a user loads your model. NetLogo offers a way to do that, through the startup procedure, which runs automatically when a model is opened. Just call your interface creation code from there.

If any global variables are used in the creation of your interface, you should remember to initialize them in startup (instead of setup, as is normally the case in NetLogo models).

Another caveat is that, as stated in startup's documentation:

startup does not run when a model is run headless from the command line, or by parallel BehaviorSpace.

If you want startup to run from BehaviorSpace, you can put a call to it in the Setup commands section of your experiment definition (see the documentation of BehaviorSpace).

Another thing to keep in mind is that, unlike for regular widgets, data entered in the extra widgets by the user is not saved in the NetLogo file. When you load the model again, the extra tabs and widgets are recreated from scratch and their values are reset to the defaults (or to values you explicitly set in interface creation code). This is arguably a good thing: accidentally overwriting default widget values when saving a model is a common source of mistakes in NetLogo. On the other hand, if you do want your model users to be able to change the default widgets values, you will need to provide them with a way to do so: either by showing them how to edit the code or by providing a save/load mechanism (perhaps via xw:export/xw:import).