Develop Reference

Cannot remove spacing between controls in TableLayoutPanel?

There's some spacing between the Buttons I add to my TableLayoutPanel. I removed the border in the Button and set the Margin and Padding to 0 in the Panel. But I continue getting that spacing.
tableLayoutPanel.RowCount is set to 8 and the Rows collection I've added 8 rows with Size Type Absolute.
Am I missing something? Here's the code:
private void FillSelectLayout()
{
tableLayoutPanelSelect.Controls.Clear();
tableLayoutPanelSelect.RowStyles.Clear();
tableLayoutPanelSelect.RowCount = 8;
for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++)
{
Button buttonSelector = new Button();
buttonSelector.Height = 64;
buttonSelector.Width = 100;
buttonSelector.FlatStyle = FlatStyle.Flat;
buttonSelector.FlatAppearance.BorderSize = 0;
buttonSelector.BackColor = Color.Yellow;
tableLayoutPanelSelect.Controls.Add(buttonSelector, 0, i);
}
}
Here's how it's displayed:

To remove the space between buttons in cells, it's enough to set dock property of them to fill and then remove default margins of buttons:
var b = new Button();
b.Dock = DockStyle.Fill;
b.Margin = new Padding(0);
Note:
Usually it's better to set Dock property of controls which you host in cells to Fill. This way your controls will follow TableLayouPanel sizing rules which you set for columns and rows.
TableLayoutPanel use Margin property of control to set the location of control in cell. So If you don'n want to set Dock and you prefer to set the Size manually, it's enough to set the Margin only.

I .. set the Margin and Padding to 0 in the Panel.
Why didn't you remove the Margin in the Buttons instead:
buttonSelector.Margin = new Padding(0);
MSDN:
The Margin property defines the space around the control that keeps
other controls a specified distance from the control's borders.

I faced the same problem while using different control in TableLayoutPanel
You can do this
Go to Design View
Click on the properties
GoTo Columns, When you click text box besides Columns, a button (...) appears on extreme right, click it
A pop up window appears, Select AutoSize (Instead of Absolute or Percentage).
In the same window in Show: select Rows and again select Autosize.
Click okay and you are done.

How to make group box text alignment center in win forms?

I am using a group box and there are several controls inside this.
My requirement is to set the group box title to the middle of the group box instead of Left.
How?

you can extend the group box class like this.
public class CustomGrpBox : GroupBox
{
private string _Text = "";
public CustomGrpBox()
{
//set the base text to empty
//base class will draw empty string
//in such way we see only text what we draw
base.Text = "";
}
//create a new property a
[Browsable(true)]
[Category("Appearance")]
[DefaultValue("GroupBoxText")]
[DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Visible)]
public new string Text
{
get
{
return _Text;
}
set
{
_Text = value;
this.Invalidate();
}
}
protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e)
{
//first let the base class to draw the control
base.OnPaint(e);
//create a brush with fore color
SolidBrush colorBrush = new SolidBrush(this.ForeColor);
//create a brush with back color
var backColor = new SolidBrush(this.BackColor);
//measure the text size
var size = TextRenderer.MeasureText(this.Text, this.Font);
// evaluate the postiong of text from left;
int left = (this.Width - size.Width) / 2;
//draw a fill rectangle in order to remove the border
e.Graphics.FillRectangle(backColor, new Rectangle(left, 0, size.Width, size.Height));
//draw the text Now
e.Graphics.DrawString(this.Text, this.Font, colorBrush, new PointF(left, 0));
}
}
add the above class into your project and use "CustomGrpBox" instead of "GroupBox" which will be created after build in your tool box.
and you can set the text any time like this.
private void Form2_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
customGrpBox1.Text = "Hello World";
}
it will look like this in design time visual studio

Unfortunately, you may set the title on the right by using the RightToLeft property, but there is no property to set it in the middle.
What you can do is to set an empty Text in your GroupBox, create a Label with the title and put that label above the GroupBox (with the same parent).
You may do it dynamically at form initialization by calling following procedure:
private void CenterGroupBoxTitle(GroupBox groupbox)
{
Label label = new Label() ;
label.Text = groupbox.Text ;
groupbox.Text = "" ;
label.Left = groupbox.Left+(groupbox.Width-label.Width)/2 ;
label.Top = groupbox.Top + 2 ; // 2 is an example : adjust the constant
label.Parent = groupbox.Parent ;
label.BringToFront() ;
}

Try to create a custom control using Panel as container and draw border around this, you can then have full control of the title's alignment.
If you would like a simple approach, you can leave the groupbox's title as empty text, and then place a label at the center position of the groupbox. You can also define this as user-control so you wouldn't need to do this repeatedly.

Not an eloquent solution, but if you have a simple GroupBox, that stays the( same size, you can just pad the beginning, and the end with spaces.
example : GroupBox.Text = " This is the groupbox text ";
The amount of padding of space's will depend on the length of the box.
Of course you'll lose some of the GroupBox's beginning and end lines on top, and if that's important, then Answer 3 seems like a good solution.

Wrapping Text on Label and Vertical scrollbar on panel

I have a label inside a panel. When the text exceeds, the label text should wrap. For doing that I have set mylabel's AutoSize = false and MaximumSize = 100,0.
Now since the text is being wrapped, vertical scrollbar should appear on panel. But that's not happening, please specify what I am missing here.
Is it possible this way or should I explicitly add a vertical scrollbar inside the panel?

1) You need to put the label inside the panel
2) AutoSize for label should be TRUE
3) AutoSize for panel should be FALSE
4) AutoScroll for panel should be True
that is it!

You should be setting AutoSize to true to automatically wrap. For the scrollbars check that you set panel.VerticalScroll.Visible = true;

Did you have the properties Scrollable=true or AutoScroll?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.webcontrols.panel.scrollbars.aspx
Try this:
ScrollBar vScrollBar1 = new VScrollBar();
vScrollBar1.Dock = DockStyle.Right;
vScrollBar1.Scroll += (sender, e) => { panel1.VerticalScroll.Value = vScrollBar1.Value; };
panel1.Controls.Add(vScrollBar1);

It's long time ago about this question.
Solution :
Panel1.AutoScroll = True
Label1.AutoSize = True
Label1.MaximumSize = New Size(Panel1.ClientRectangle.Width - 18, 0)
Impotrant thing is to define MaximumSize for Label width. Height leave 0 (zero). Height will grow with label content.
In this case, maximum width of label would be width of panel - 18px for scroller.

Label grow from right to left

I have a label on my form which is on the right of the form. This label loads a dynamic text.
Sometimes the text that it loads is too long and the text crosses the border of the form, that is some of the text is out of the form.
I want to make the label to grow from right to left instead of left to right. How do I achieve this?

I solved this by setting the label
AutoSize property to false,
TextAlign to MiddleRight,
an Anchor to the right.
Notice that the label size itself is not growing with the text, but you can handle it by giving it enough width to fit the content. The visual effect is the same.

My problem here was that my label was in a panel, and anything I did wasn't working.
What I did was to place the label in a TableLayoutPanel control and set the TableLayoutPanel's RightToLeft property to True; this did the trick.

You can't make it "grow from right to left", but you can assign it's Left property so that it won't go out of the form:
label1.Text = "some dynamic text here...";
if (label1.Right > this.Width)
label1.Left = this.Width - label1.Width;
If the design allows it, you can also double its height so that the text will span two lines.

You can use the TableLayoutPanel or other compatible container control, but instead setting RightToLeft property for the container set Dock="Right" for the label
Setting RightToLeft property does not always give the expected results as for some string formats the string is modified changing the order of the words.

you can Write it:
public enum Leftorright { left,right}
private Leftorright _LeftToRight = Leftorright.left;
public Leftorright LeftToRight
{
get { return _LeftToRight; }
set { _LeftToRight = value; }
}
protected override void OnTextChanged(EventArgs e)
{
int oldWidth;
oldWidth = this.Width;
base.OnTextChanged(e);
if (LeftToRight == Leftorright.right && this.Width != oldWidth)
{
this.Left = this.Left - this.Width + oldWidth;
}
}

using System.Windows.Forms;
/// <summary>
/// The position of myLabel to the left of the otherControl component when entering
/// text "s".
/// You must set myLabel.AutoSize = true
/// </summary>
/// <param name="s">text</param>
void WriteText(string s)
{
int len = TextRenderer.MeasureText ( s, myLabel.Font ).Width;
myLabel.Left = otherControl.Left - 5 - len;
myLabel.Text = s;
}

Wrap the label inside a FlowLayoutPanel and set the following properties in the panel:
Anchor to right;
AutoSize to GrowAndShrink;
FlowDirection to RightToLeft

Temperature TextBox In C#

I need some code to convert standard C# TextBox to temperature TextBox which means adding "°C" to end of the text in the textbox with another color than the default color.

To get the degree symbol you can use character code 176 e.g.
Char degree = (Char)176
You can then append this to your textbox content or I would just add a label to the right of the textbox with the degree symbol if you want to control the forecolor easily.

TextBox is a plain text editor. To get different colours you would have to muck around with a rich text box. Why not put the "°C" in a label positioned to the right of the text box? That would also make your parsing and rendering code much easier.

You could probably create your own control which inherits from TextBox and then override Text property to automaticaly add °C though other color inside the same TextBox could be problem.
Why you want to have °C in TextBox ?
Can't it just be label right after TextBox ?
You can set static text and color to what you want.

The other solutions proposed here are probably sufficient for your application; however, if you had the need to implement this with re-usability in mind, here is a custom control solution which you may extend to better suit your application:
public class TemperatureTextBox : ContainerControl
{
private const int BORDER_SIZE = 1;
// Exposes text property of text box,
// expose other text box properties as needed:
public override string Text
{
get { return textBox.Text; }
set { textBox.Text = value; }
}
private TextBox textBox = new TextBox()
{
Text = string.Empty,
BorderStyle = BorderStyle.None,
Dock = DockStyle.Fill
};
private Label label = new Label()
{
Text = "°C",
TextAlign = ContentAlignment.MiddleCenter,
Size = new Size()
{
Width = 32
},
BackColor = SystemColors.Window,
Dock = DockStyle.Right
};
public TemperatureTextBox()
{
this.BackColor = SystemColors.Window;
this.Padding = new Padding(BORDER_SIZE);
this.Controls.Add(label);
this.Controls.Add(textBox);
this.PerformLayout();
}
// Constrain control size to textbox height plus top and bottom border:
protected override void OnResize(EventArgs e)
{
base.OnResize(e);
this.Height = (textBox.Height + (BORDER_SIZE * 2));
}
// Render a border around the control:
protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e)
{
base.OnPaint(e);
e.Graphics.DrawRectangle(
SystemPens.ControlDarkDark,
new Rectangle()
{
Width = (this.Width - BORDER_SIZE),
Height = (this.Height - BORDER_SIZE)
});
}
}
Simply create a new class and drop this code in and rebuild you solution. It will create a new TemperatureTextBox control in the toolbox which can be dropped onto a new form and visually designed.
This example exposes the Text property of the underlying text box by overriding the custom control's text property. You may want to expose other properties, and events depending on what your application needs to accomplish.