I have displayed an image in a Windows form. The user can draw a rectangle on top of this. When the user releases the mouse after drawing the image, I need to display a few buttons, similarly to showing a tooltip.
So far, I have:
Created a new WinForm named Toolbar
Removed titlebar
Added tooltip control on the WinForm
Added 4 buttons
Being an ASP.NET web developer I perceive the following items as missing:
Handle MouseUp event
Get co-ordinates of the mouse release location (say x1, y1)
Render my Toolbar Winform with top position as (x1, y1)
Let the respective buttons handle their responsibilities in their event handlers
Can you please help me validate my approach and show some pointers for the code?
You can use ContextMenuStrip (info from MSDN)
With 4 Items and just show it on MouseUp event with:
contextMenuStrip1.Show(Cursor.Position);
Two approaches:
This. You create a Popup form, which will be automatically hidden similar to popup menu and can host controls (buttons).
Display (draw) buttons inside your control, on top of its content (on top of graphics which you drawn), process mouse clicks, perform operations accordingly. Most difficult will be to draw nice looking buttons, to example, by using VisualStyleRenderer (xp-style).
Do not aks big question (containing many small one), rather try something, if it doesn't work or you are not satisfied with results, then come here and ask question (while also telling what you are trying to do). This way you will get help very quickly.
Related
I am currently trying to make a program where I have a picture of a calendar and when the user clicks on any given Friday a message box will appear. The current method I have been trying to do this is by placing a button over the dates, but I can't seem to find a way so that the button will be invisible and functional at the same time.
This is all in C# Windows Forms Application.
Any ideas?
There are several solutions:
Use an empty PictureBox instead of a Button. This is the nearest and quickest solution to what you say you want. Note that this secondary PictureBox needs to be a child of the calendar's one (with its background color set to Transparent). Transparency in Windows.Forms only applies to direct parents (it's more complex than this, but let's simplify).
Use the MouseUp event on the PictureBox where you are showing the calendar, and use the MouseEventArgs supplied as arguments to the event handler to find the X and Y position of the mouse within that control when the button was clicked.
Use a decent calendar/datepicker control instead of showing an image of one
Matter of fact: I don't endorse #1, and just put it there since it's what you seem to be asking for. I'd rather go with #2 or #3 (specially #3)
PS: if you want to really simulate Click, you should need to handle both MouseDown and MouseUp (a click usually means pressing a mouse button down on a control then releasing it within the same control)
Hello,
Above is the program I am writing. On the right panel is basically two custom controls (the blue rectangle area) I created and just added them as controls to the background panel control when this winform program loads.
I used MS paint to draw out the pop up balloon that I want to see when my mouse enter this control's area. I want to do the following:
1. If mouse enter the control area, the yellow area balloon pop up and populate with the information of that specific control
2. If mouse move out of the control area, the pop up balloon disappear.
Can this be done with Winform application? I looked around and found out about Tooltip class but so far from researching I don't know if it does what I want to do.
I could be wrong but googling around gave me the impress that Tooltip offers very little in term of style. Ideally I want to make this pop up balloon into almost like a border-less pop up window where I can put image , font ect.....at will. Also Tooltip works if you hover over a button or specific field whereas I want the entire control area.
Can this be done? I appreciate if you can point me to any work around if there is one.
I wrote a comment, but I figure I'll expand it into a full answer. This is assuming you want a new control, which isn't a tooltip, for maximum customizability. I did something similar to this for work recently, to act as a non-modal info popup that disappears when clicked.
Creating a Custom Popup Form
What you want is essentially a floating popup that appears over your form, which means you'll want to define a new Form object, rather than a UserControl, as it won't actually be embedded within your other form.
Give it a multiline, non-editable textbox that you can fill with the information you want to populate, then simply call a new instance of the form on your Mouse_Enter event. Close it upon Mouse_Leave.
Adjusting The Style
You'll have to play with it a bit to get it to actually act like a popup and not just a window. I'd recommend setting it to a non-modal popup, and removing the border. You can write a function to automatically size it to its contents. I don't imagine you'll want the user manually resizing it.
Some other things to look into would be overriding the CreateParams property that comes with the basic Form object. You can force DropShadows and TopMost forms without making the form modal. Overriding ShowWithoutActivation to always return true will prevent the form from stealing focus when it pops up.
I'm not sure if you can pull off rounded edges like you have in your mockup. Perhaps you can pull it off with some wizardry in the OnPaint() function, but I couldn't tell you how to do it.
It might be a bit of a pain for fiddling around with, but you can get some good functionality and appearance out of it. If you think you can pull it off acceptably with the ToolTip class, go for it. It took me about a week to get my notifications where I wanted them (though I added several features that you probably don't need to worry about).
Examples
Some keywords to look up in related searches would be Toast Notification and Non-Modal Popup. This might be some use:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/442983/Android-Style-Toast-Notification-for-NET
Since you already have implemented custom user controls you might want to try it again. Make a control that is that style and color, changes it's size based on it's text. You can feed it information (such as the text to display) from your existing user control object. You can also have the mouse enter/leave code reside in your first user control.
If you're not sure how to make a rectangle with round corners you can either make it on the fly using a graphics object (which will turn into a bitmap on the screen) or make it how you want it to look in GIMP (or photoshop if you have it) then use that image as the background on your user control. Make the default background transparent (so your voids above the round corners are not grey). If you make a pre loaded image you'll need to be aware you will only be able to scale it equally in Y and X directions. unequal scaling will make it look distorted.
Can you use the Mouse_Enter event on the control?
I'm developing a small tool where you can drag and drop controls with the mouse, such as buttons, comboboxes, groupboxes, etc...
As the mouse moves, the control moves too, so the user can get a preview of the position of that control. The problem comes when, the control being dragged is going from one container to another one. Usually resulting in that control moving correctly but just under the second container, and therefore, not visible for the user. Let's say that we have GroupBox A and GroupBox B, and the user wants to move Button from A to B. When the action starts, the button is visible while the movement is inside the bounds of A, but when the mouse gets into B, the Buttons just appears to be in a lower layer of the interface and it becomes invisible.
I've tried to fix it with .BringToFront() and .SendToBack() without results. I'm having some flickering problems also trying to create a bitmap to create that preview even using the methods recomended here to solve it.
Is there a way of fixing it without having to use bitmaps that solves the layer problem?
I have a custom Canvas control (inherited from Canvas) overlaid over a large area of User Controls. The idea is to draw paths between user controls (i.e. connector lines).
To capture mouse movement, I call Mouse.Capture(theCanvas) on MouseDown. This works beautifully, but the user controls under the canvas obviously no longer receive mouse events. Mouse.DirectlyOver always shows the canvas, so I can't really fake it by peeking at the current position and seeing which user control it's over.
So, I still need the Canvas for drawing paths, but how can I solve this one of the following ways:
Peek under the Canvas and see what the topmost control is right under it?
Get this MouseDown -> Track MouseMoves -> MouseUp workflow to work on the canvas without mouse captures?
Any other ideas welcome...
I'd agree that those are your two options. If you want to only forward some clicks to your usercontrols, then go with option 1, and hit test the controls under the canvas.
If you need your usercontrols to behave as though there is nothing covering them (textboxes, buttons etc), then i'd recommend using the PreviewMouseMove event on the user control's parent, as this can pick up and optionally "handle" events before the controls get at the event, but it won't block the event if you don't set handled to true
Ok, I have googled, but maybe I put my search in weirdly. :/
I have a VB.NET WinForms application. I have the anchor properties set for all the controls so that it will resize all the controls to look decent when the form is maximized. (Haven't gotten around to manual resizing yet however).
Anyway, the problem:
I go to set the same properties for a button (testing with a single button for now) on the main GUI form/picture. When I go to run the program via F5, it looks decent. But when I maximize the form, the entire button covers up more than it should.
I've taken screenshots of the form so you can see a visual of what I'm talking about. :/
Before: http://zack.scudstorm.com/before.png
After: http://zack.scudstorm.com/after.png
What other propert(y|ies) do I need to set for the buttons to show up correctly? :/ (The buttons go over the boxes that say, for example, "1-1", "2-3", etc.
Thanks,
-Zack
Seems like you have anchored top-left and bottom-right when what you want is just top-left.
Edit: If it's just an image that does not change when the winform changes, then don't anchor your buttons at all. Just put them where they go. If you are scaling the image, then I would either detect the clicks on the image and do the scaling math or do the scaling math and set my buttons in code in the Form.OnResize event.
As it appears that your goal is just to be able to handle clicks on the "computers"...
One option that can be useful for this sort of task is to create an "overlay" bitmap (not displayed, but which is the exact same size as your source bitmap) which uses different colors to represent all the clickable regions. (e.g. (R=0,G=0,B=0) for computer 0, (0,0,1) for computer 1, etc)
You could even generate this bitmap somewhat automatically without too much trouble (If you have a mode where you can click the top left and then bottom right corners of the image to define a new region)
When the mouse is clicked, you can check the pixel at the scaled coordinates of the mouse position in the overlay and determine what their click corresponds to. This can be a lot easier than creating loads of controls, and makes it a lot easier to have clickable regions that aren't rectangular.