ı have been serching this for a while but I couldn't come up with a conclusion. What is UserControl? For me we can do everything with creating new windows forms instead of User Control. I know there is a reason to use but it is not clear right now. If someone illuminates the mystery that would be great.
A user control is basically a grouping of other existing control, intended as a reusable component (i.e. composite control). If you need to place the same group of controls on different windows you'd rather group them in a user control, adding things like data validation for instance, and then reuse this control whenever you need it.
Here is some more reading.
UserControls allow you to reuse your code. For example if you need a small component that displays two values (code and description), with UserControls you can design it only one time and then reuse it in other forms.
Also, you can add your custom properties\methods to the UserControl; in this way you can define simple (or even more complex) functions associated to the GUI control.
Hope this helps.
imagine you have a GridView with some new methods you create, and which you want to use on several pages. There you go. A UserControl is useful. That's just one example
As the others have explained a UserControl groups 'real' Controls and the logic that makes them work together as one component.
Imagine an application where the user can decide wether it runs in MDI mode or with separate windows or with tabbed pages. You can add the UCs of your application to any of these easily.
Think of a MP3 player with various controls, buttons, labels and sliders and user drawn-gauges. If it's in a UC you can re-use it directly. If it is all on a window, how do you re-use it?
So UCs are about flexibilty and re-using visual components.
Related
My goal is to make an application where, conceptually, everything happens in a single window - a principle most applications I commonly use exhibit, at least for their main interface. Installers are a good example of what I am trying to do, where you basically page through the interface.
You can do this fairly well using a (invisible) tabcontrol. This allows you to design the individual tabpages (which are basically forms as far as controls go) in the designer, and you can manually switch between tabpages, and it all takes place inside the same outer form.
The problem is, this results in code for everything all in the main form. What I want is basically the design capabilities of separate forms (drag-and-drop components, only has code for its own controls), but that can be put inside the tabcontrol to get the intended user interface.
What is the best way to do this? I assume there is a clean solution given how common this is.
Thus far I have followed C# Multiple Screen View Single Form, which works well aside from the fact that all the code ends up in the same class (for example, you need unique names for every single element on the form).
I think you're looking for UserControls. They let you create a "form without a window" if I had to simplify it.
Once you've built the UserControl, you can then drag and drop it into any Form.
You can then replace these controls at runtime as needed.
See this link for a decent starting tutorial. I'll update if I find a better tutorial out there.
http://www.akadia.com/services/dotnet_user_controls.html
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've been designing a pretty complicated avionics application. The thing is, it has many menu buttons to be clicked (12 to be exact) and each one of them perform a different action. For instance, one could be a login panel and the other one a PDF reader. How could I organize this programmatically?
Currently, I've been setting each item in a panel and setting it to visible or invisible, according to the active or clicked item.
How would you guys do this?
Thanks in advance!
You might consider a FlowLayoutPanel, although I'm not sure how flexible it would be in meeting your requirements. If you set your panels up with docking properties, you should be able to manage.
I would also recommend using a UserControl to separate code and functionality. If panels need to communicate, implement the observer/observable pattern instead of subscribing to events between user controls.
Like IAbstract says, you should consider separating the different UI elements as UserControls. You can then do things like use a factory to construct them and add them to your window as required.
I've found this sort of approach, used with a Model-View-Presenter type pattern, works really well for WinForms apps with dynamic user interfaces.
I'm creating an application that has to handle the construction cases of a small company. In order for the employees to create a new case, I want to put them through a step-by-step process. How do i setup up such a process?
I've tried putting them on panels instead, but this still seams like a not so elegant way to solve this problem.
Right now i'm hiding/showing lots of textboxes and listboxes individually. Is there some smarter(more correct) way to group these. Or could someone suggest another approach to this? I'm building it in c#.
The best way i have used in this scenario is to create all your Buttons, Textboxes, etc for one step in a UserControl and do the same for each step and better embed all your code specific to that step in that control itself.
On Form only keep those controls which are Universal for every Steps. Then have a container control like a Panel on the form as a Placeholder (so that you don't have to worry about positioning ..however you can even in code set the Location of the Control on Form and directly Add it to Form's Controls Collection)
Then on first step create a new instance of UserCotrol for Fisrt Step and add the first UserControl to the Forms Control Collection or that Container Control (Panel) and on next step Remove it and Replace it with Next UserControl.
This way you wont have all controls in the Memory all the Time and they will be created when required and Disposed when not required. Its Efficient and also isolate each step so you have manageable code for each step.
What about creating a Wizard for it? Hope the following links also helps you.
What is the best way to create a wizard in C# 2.0?
Creating Wizards for Windows Forms in C#
Creating Wizards for Win Forms in C#