I am developing an application in Windows Form C#, it begins with an explanatory window, language selection and a start button when the desired language is selected, I want that when I press the start button, all the elements disappear and begin the application process, I had thought of creating a new form, but this opens a new window and I don't want that, I want everything to happen on a window. Apart from making all the previous controls invisible, is there any way to achieve this? Or maybe a way to make all the controls invisible without going one by one?
You could put multiple controls in a panel for example and hide/show entire panel.
If you dont want to do that, you could always do it in a loop
for example:
foreach ( var control in this.Controls)
{
control.Visible=false;
}
Ofcourse you could also add controls dynamically, but that might be hard for a beginner.
You could also make use of MDI forms, but that might be also not worth it.
SOLVED
Solved using user controls, user controls allow me to design the application interface in the same way as a form and I can add and remove that control from the form as many times as I want, making it possible to display numerous interfaces in a single Windows Forms window.
This solution was suggested by Jeroen van Langen in the comments of my question and it was exactly what I was looking for.
Related
My C# standard windows forms app is finished, it has 10 forms. But the new requirement is now to change the "multiple forms" to one dashboard where you click a link on a bar on the side or top and switch between forms in the main area of the dashboard one at a time, pretty much exactly the same way an old HTML frame works with framesets (just imagine my Windows Forms are framesets).
Without going into much detail, each of these forms are pretty involved, multiple threads and so on, and I am looking for a simple trick to display them, as oposed to recoding the entire thing.
I looked at http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/37397/A-Multipanel-Control-in-C
but it's not what I want.
Is there a way to do this?
If you convert the forms into custom controls, it then becomes pretty simple to use the TabControl http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.tabcontrol.aspx to display the custom controls on the surfaces of the Tabs it contains.
By making them custom controls you avoid the mixing of the code for each of them (they remain distinct) but they also become easily added to other surfaces. I do this with a UI with a dozen display tabs.
I would recommend that you either use a tabbed control, or use an MDI Container, or a combination of both. The MDI has some nice behaviors that you'll get for free by implementing it. You could hard code each tab to each form, or have a dropdown that selects each view. If you want to manage the lifecycle of each form, you could implement a singleton pattern on each, or use IOC.
Not entirely sure this is going to solve your problem, but if you have questions or more details, let me know.
I resolved this using MDI as suggested above, works great in .NET Windows Forms 4.0 and 4.5.1.
In the parent form:
Declare a new child form.
myNewChildForm.MdiParent = this;
set child form StartPosition to Manual.
set child form Location to 0,0.
set child form WindowState to Maximized.
set child form Dock to Dockstyle.Fill
That does the trick.
Thank you all.
I am working in a Windows Forms application, it needs a lot (and I mean a lot) of controls. Using tab controls to organize them (sometimes nested tab controls).
I was reading how to load the App faster and a lot of people said to think twice if the controls are really needed. Well, to be honest I think that it's possible to reduce the number of controls used BUT the client requested it that way, so there's almost nothing I can do about it.
I was reading that I should use multithreading tactics but there's a hardware limitation: the application MUST run on an average neetbook. It's really a pain because I'm limited in terms of load time and how much space I can use to put the controls.
I was wondering if I can just load one or two tabs before the form is shown and then load the others, would that be possible/correct/efficient? If it is, how could I achieve it? I also was planning to use MDI childs but I need to retrieve all the information in all the controls at some point (from absolutely all the tabs and nested tabs).
Can you please give me some tips? Do you have any experience working on something similar?
One strategy is creating your main page with a TabControl holding empty TabPages.
Then you can design several auxiliary forms (one for each TabPage you require) each containing a single Panel control with Public visibility (change the Panel's Modifiers property to Public) holding the real UI elements that you would have placed on the TabPage.
When the empty TabPage is clicked by the user, then you create the auxiliary Form (you don't show it, just create it), and then access the Panel control in the auxiliary Form, then you can reparent it to your empty tab Page, like this
AuxForm1 frm = new AuxForm1();
frm.MainPanel.Parent = this.tabControl1.TabPages[0];
This will delay the TabPage's control creation until the panel is clicked by the user :)
Hope this helps!
I was wondering if I can just load one or two tabs before the form is shown and then load the others
You could make each "tab" contain a UserControl, and load that UserControl on demand, when the tab is activated. That would, at least, prevent you from having to initialize everything on startup.
"lots of controls" is not a requirement anyone can answer. A dropdown list with tens of millions of rows is a very different problem than a wizard UI with thousands of steps and require different answers.
Why has the client "requested it that way"? We need to know the actual deliverable requirements to answer your question. Have you shown them alternatives?
First, post some of your mockups. If you don't have mockups yet, make some and perform paper testing with them, then post them.
Who's "a lot of people"? Testers? Customers? Anonymous forum posters? Post your mockups to https://ux.stackexchange.com/ and ask for comments.
"I can just load one or two tabs before the form is shown"? Of course you can do that, but why are you presupposing that your UI will be "one or two tabs" before you have shown us any requirements at all? Get requirements, make mockups, then ask specific, answerable questions.
I'm making a custom GUI for my application. Basically my application has multiple 'tabs'. Each tab has a panel control binded to it, to display tabs contents. Whenever any of the tabs are clicked, appropriate panel control becomes visible (that displays contents) and the rest of the panels become invisible.
The problem is that when I design them in Visual Studio, it's hard to work, ether panels are stacked up on each other or I put them in different coordinates, and when panel becomes active, it's location is updated.
Is there I way I could design all the panels, like on separate 'form' or something like the same way I have separate classes? if that makes sense. Thanks!
EDIT:
I can't use the standard tab control, because my application has custom GUI, all buttons and everything is designed in image processing app. Tab control doesn't allow me to use my own graphics.
I'm going to take a look at UserControl, thanks everybody!
You can create each tab content in a separate UserControl. Use that each UserControl as the only content on each tab.
You should be able to design each "panel" as a separate UserControl.
Your main Form can just be composed from those UserControls, instead of having the entire UI built into one class.
First I would suggest you stick with the standard .NET controls in most cases. Particularly in this case the standard TabControl seems to be a good fit.
That said, you can place all the panels on the form in their final location (being sure not to place a panel within the other panel). You can then use the drop down in the Properties dialog to select the Panel you wish to work with. Next go to the Format menu and choose Order->Bring to Front. This will bring the wanted panel to the front so you may use the designer on it. You can then continue to hide or show the appropriate panels at runtime.
What I am trying to remember is the name of a windows form control which allows with an ID change allows programmer to move between its states, which are different panels with different controls on them. There is a control that does exactly this - but I can't remember its name at all. Do you know anything similar to this in C#?
edit: basically, I have a windows form. It has a panel. I want to, by changing panel's a specific property, I want to switch between its states, every state containing another set of windows form controls. I cannot, however, remember the name of this control. Any ideas? Sorry if my first wording is confusing.
It sounds like you mean something like a wizard? In asp.net webforms has a wizard control buy afaik the closest in windows forms is TabControl. But no matter; it is trivial to simply hide and show some Panel controls. It can be trickier to use the designer, of course - but you can lay them out next to each other and move then at runtime as needed.
Looks like there are a few wizards available for WinForms too
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/195255/best-wizard-control-for-net-windows-forms
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/WizardDemo.aspx
And, well, plenty of others
In my C# class, we use Visual Studio. My teacher says it is really not good practice to be stacking controls or panels on top of each other and hiding and showing them when needed. They say it should all be kept to separate forms. However, this puzzles me. I can understand that if you are in design mode, it is a little strange to see all these controls on top of each other, but you edit them all separately, so I don't see the issue. I think its really odd to be closing and opening forms like that and it looks a bit strange to the user.
Say you had an application in which you wanted to use multiple controls on top of each other. Say for example it was a login/register form and you didn't want to use a tab control, for whatever reason, and you wanted buttons in the menu strip to switch between the login or register user control, wouldn't it make sense to simply hide/show user controls?