Develop Reference

How to hide control when click outside it?

I have a WindowForm and some controls on it.
My point is that when I click button "?" on top-right of the datagridview, it will show a picture box and when I click outside the pictureBox, it must invisible.
My MainForm
MyPictureBox
I have searched some topics on this site, but some dont work, some work partly. Like
this.
I also tried:
void pictureBox1_LostFocus(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (pictureBox1.Visible)
pictureBox1.Visible = false;
}
But when I click on button2, button3, ... The pictureBox wasn't invisible.
Any solution will be highly appreciated.

I think your pictureBox1 isn't losing focus, cause it never actually GOT focused. Set it to be focused after making it visible.

Oh, I have encountered this before...
I was making a Label that you could double click and it would allow you to edit the Label.Text, like a TextBox. However, I was having problems hooking into the events to know when the user had clicked off the Control and wished to stop editing. I tried Control.LostFocus, and Control.Leave, but nothing. I even got frustrated/desperate and tried some silly ones like Control.Invalidated.
What I ended up having to do was subscribe to the Click event of the Form/Container/Control behind it.
However, putting the responsibility of wiring up this event into the Form that wants to use it is poor design. What you can do, however is to make the constructor to Control class require a reference to the owner/parent/container as a parameter. That way, the requirements are not hidden, they must be satisfied before you can get a object instance, and the control can wired up to the Form.Click within itself, where that logic belongs.
private Form owner;
public EditLabel(Form Owner)
{
this.owner = Owner;
owner.Click += EndEditing;
}

Add this method in designer.cs:
pictureBoxEvent this.MouseLeave += new EventHandler(pictureBox_MouseLeave);
Add this code in cs file:
private void pictureBox_MouseLeave(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
pictureBox1.Visible = false;
}

C# click on control

I'm trying to create a custom control which fires an even on click.
My control is just a panel with a couple of labels and a picturebox inside.
The click works perfectly, the only issue is that I have to click the background of the control and if I press on the picturebox, is not working.
I've added the on click event to the control, but I would like to press in every place of it to trigger the event, not just the background of the panel.
I thought about adding a transparent object that covers entirely the control. I actually don't like this idea, however, I've tried with a picturebox, but i cannot see through it. It's not transparent. I can just see the panel background but It covers the labels and the image.
Thanks for the support.

If you just have a couple of objects in your panel, you can hook the Click event of all objects it contains to the same event handler, there is nothing wrong doing this.
public class MyUserControl : UserControl
{
public event Action<MyUserControl> MyControlClick
public string ID {get; set;}
public MyUserControl()
{
InitializeComponents();
// The same event handler code will be used for the three controls
myPictureBox.Click += global_Click;
myLabel1.Click += global_Click;
myLabel2.Click += global_Click;
this.Click += global_Click;
}
void global_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (MyControlClick != null)
MyControlClick(this);
}
}
If you have a more important amount of objects, you can rely on this answer to create a truly transparent panel that handles clicks. The drawback is that you will have to detect which object has been clicked by using HitTest based on the mouse location.
On the form side :
aControl.MyControlClick += aControl_MyControlClick;
// ...
// This code is triggered when a MyUserControl is clicked
void aControl_MyControlClick(MyUserControl ctl)
{
MessageBox.Show(ctl.ID);
}

Actually! You cannot raise any event to the element in the Usercontrol unless you have to apply own method to your usercontrol or you can disable the element in the usercontrol but it will change the color of that element but It will raise the click event when you click your control.

.NET forms - disabled control missing events

I have a disabled from element and I want to enable it on double-click.
The problem is the DoubleClick handler only gets called when Foo.Enabled = True. When it's disabled, the handler doesn't received the double-click event.
this.Foo.DoubleClick += new System.EventHandler(this.Foo_OnDoubleClick);
// Handler
private void Foo_OnDoubleClick(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Console.WriteLine("Double click");
}
Is there any workaround to this?

Create your own control inheriting from its base control (FOO) and override the Enable behavior. That way you will be able to make it behave the way that you wish.
EXAMPLE:
public class MyControl : Button //Example control
{
//Override and/or implement what you need in this control
public MyControl()
{
}
protected override void OnEnabledChanged(EventArgs e)
{
// Do whatever you wish to do
}
}

I still want to prevent users from entering a value when it is disabled.
Your question makes it sounds like you want to apply this to any control, but then your comment makes it sounds like you want to apply it to a TextBox.
If the latter case is true, set the TextBox.ReadOnly property to True instead of disabling the control.
Users will not be able to edit the value, but the double-click event will still fire.

You Should handle mouse double click event of Parent(all double click goes to Enabled parent) then by check mouse location returned by event against each disabled control rectangle you can determine which control has been clicked.

Creating Event for Multiple Forms

I have tried a bunch of different things, so obviously I am now stuck... I have created a form, it has a button on it - that when clicked creates a new form. I can click away and create multiple forms this way. What I would like and can not get to work is to have the main form have a second button on it - that when clicked will change all of the background colors on the secondary forms.
Thanks - I am guessing I close, but then again - close doesn't work...

Bascally you do not need event or delegate type of things to solve this issue. In your secondary forms write a public method to change background color. Keep a list of secondary forms and when button is clicked just loop through all your secondary forms and call the color changing methods
Using events
In your parent form do something like this.
private event Action<Color> ChangeColor;
private void CreateAndShowForm()
{
var form2 = new Form2();
ChangeColor += form2.changeColor;
/*do other stuff to show form*/
}
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
ChangeColor(Color.Red);
}
In the child forms
public void changeColor(Color obj)
{
/*change background color*/
}

There are a few ways to achieve this, but one way is to keep a collection of all child Forms in the main form and call a custom change background color method on each of them. You can create a ChildFormBase class that they all can inherit from where you can define the method to avoid repeating it in all child forms.
You can also do this with an event that you raise in the MainForm that the child forms can subscribe to.

In .NET, when an event is raised, all the objects listening to it (registered as event listeners) are notified that the event has been raised and execute the respective event handler. Therefore, in your case, each subform should be registered to the specific event of the main form, as an event listener. Each time the main form raises the event, the subforms will be notified that the event has been raised and act accordingly.
You could see this as a guide to the events paradigm in C#.
Hope I helped!

Is there any way to detect a mouseclick outside a user control?

I'm creating a custom dropdown box, and I want to register when the mouse is clicked outside the dropdown box, in order to hide it. Is it possible to detect a click outside a control? or should I make some mechanism on the containing form and check for mouseclick when any dropdownbox is open?

So I finally understand that you only want it to close when the user clicks outside of it. In that case, the Leave event should work just fine... For some reason, I got the impression you wanted it to close whenever they moved the mouse outside of your custom dropdown. The Leave event is raised whenever your control loses the focus, and if the user clicks on something else, it will certainly lose focus as the thing they clicked on gains the focus.
The documentation also says that this event cascades up and down the control chain as necessary:
The Enter and Leave events are hierarchical and will cascade up and down the parent chain until the appropriate control is reached. For example, assume you have a Form with two GroupBox controls, and each GroupBox control has one TextBox control. When the caret is moved from one TextBox to the other, the Leave event is raised for the TextBox and GroupBox, and the Enter event is raised for the other GroupBox and TextBox.
Overriding your UserControl's OnLeave method is the best way to handle this:
protected override void OnLeave(EventArgs e)
{
// Call the base class
base.OnLeave(e);
// When this control loses the focus, close it
this.Hide();
}
And then for testing purposes, I created a form that shows the drop-down UserControl on command:
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
private UserControl1 customDropDown;
public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
// Create the user control
customDropDown = new UserControl1();
// Add it to the form's Controls collection
Controls.Add(customDropDown);
customDropDown.Hide();
}
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// Display the user control
customDropDown.Show();
customDropDown.BringToFront(); // display in front of other controls
customDropDown.Select(); // make sure it gets the focus
}
}
Everything works perfectly with the above code, except for one thing: if the user clicks on a blank area of the form, the UserControl doesn't close. Hmm, why not? Well, because the form itself doesn't want the focus. Only controls can get the focus, and we didn't click on a control. And because nothing else stole the focus, the Leave event never got raised, meaning that the UserControl didn't know it was supposed to close itself.
If you need the UserControl to close itself when the user clicks on a blank area in the form, you need some special case handling for that. Since you say that you're only concerned about clicks, you can just handle the Click event for the form, and set the focus to a different control:
protected override void OnClick(EventArgs e)
{
// Call the base class
base.OnClick(e);
// See if our custom drop-down is visible
if (customDropDown.Visible)
{
// Set the focus to a different control on the form,
// which will force the drop-down to close
this.SelectNextControl(customDropDown, true, true, true, true);
}
}
Yes, this last part feels like a hack. The better solution, as others have mentioned, is to use the SetCapture function to instruct Windows to capture the mouse over your UserControl's window. The control's Capture property provides an even simpler way to do the same thing.

Technically, you'll need to p/invoke SetCapture() in order to receive click events that happen outside of your control.
But in your case, handling the Leave event, as #Martin suggests, should be sufficient.
EDIT: While looking for an usage example for SetCapture(), I came across the Control.Capture property, of which I was not aware. Using that property means you won't have to p/invoke anything, which is always a good thing in my book.
So, you'll have to set Capture to true when showing the dropdown, then determine if the mouse pointer lies inside the control in your click event handler and, if it doesn't, set Capture to false and close the dropdown.
UPDATE:
You can also use the Control.Focused property to determine if the control has got or lost focus when using a keyboard or mouse instead of using the Capture with the same example provided in the MSDN Capture page.

Handle the Form's MouseDown event, or override the Form's OnMouseDown
method:
enter code here
And then:
protected override void OnMouseDown(MouseEventArgs e)
{
if (!theListBox.Bounds.Contains(e.Location))
{
theListBox.Visible = false;
}
}
The Contains method old System.Drawing.Rectangle can be used to indicate if
a point is contained inside a rectangle. The Bounds property of a Control is
the outer Rectangle defined by the edges of the Control. The Location
property of the MouseEventArgs is the Point relative to the Control which
received the MouseDown event. The Bounds property of a Control in a Form is
relative to the Form.

You are probably looking for the leave event:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.leave.aspx
Leave occurs when the input focus leaves the control.

I just wanted to share this. It is probably not a good way of doing it that way, but looks like it works for drop down panel that closes on fake "MouseLeave", I tried to hide it on Panel MouseLeave but it does not work because moving from panel to button leaves the panel because the button is not the panel itself. Probably there is better way of doing this but I am sharing this because I used about 7 hours figuring out how to get it to work. Thanks to #FTheGodfather
But it works only if the mouse moves on the form. If there is a panel this will not work.
private void click_to_show_Panel_button_MouseDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
item_panel1.Visible = true; //Menu Panel
}
private void Form1_MouseMove(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
if (!item_panel1.Bounds.Contains(e.Location))
{
item_panel1.Visible = false; // Menu panel
}
}

I've done this myself, and this is how I did it.
When the drop down is opened, register a click event on the control's parent form:
this.Form.Click += new EventHandler(CloseDropDown);
But this only takes you half the way. You probably want your drop down to close also when the current window gets deactivated. The most reliable way of detecting this has for me been through a timer that checks which window is currently active:
[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("user32.dll")]
static extern IntPtr GetForegroundWindow();
and
var timer = new Timer();
timer.Interval = 100;
timer.Tick += (sender, args) =>
{
IntPtr f = GetForegroundWindow();
if (this.Form == null || f != this.Form.Handle)
{
CloseDropDown();
}
};
You should of course only let the timer run when the drop down is visible. Also, there's probably a few other events on the parent form you'd want to register when the drop down is opened:
this.Form.LocationChanged += new EventHandler(CloseDropDown);
this.Form.SizeChanged += new EventHandler(CloseDropDown);
Just don't forget to unregister all these events in the CloseDropDown method :)
EDIT:
I forgot, you should also register the Leave event on you control to see if another control gets activated/clicked:
this.Leave += new EventHandler(CloseDropDown);
I think I've got it now, this should cover all bases. Let me know if I'm missing something.

If you have Form, you can simply use Deactivate event just like this :
protected override void OnDeactivate(EventArgs e)
{
this.Dispose();
}