I have problems with editing panels in C# windows forms(Visual studio 2008). I placed some panels into another, and now I have problems with navigating panels inside parental containers. Is there any tool that gives not only drag-drop control, but also tree view of container and panels in it. For example, like Navigator window in NetBeans(IDE for Java). Any help?
I'm not sure about VS2008, but newer versions have Document Outline Window (View > Other Windows > Document Outline)
To not get lost in controls, consider to name them properly. Then you can find them in the list of Properties window.
Instead of label1 use labelInputName, located on panel1, which you also rename to panelInput. This gives parent/child feeling and you will never lost.
If you get lost, use Document Outline window to see tree-like relation via Controls property (who is control of who). This window is a helper (help to find and select control), you will still have to use designer to do changes.
Another important thing is UI design. Whenever you get cluttered or bulky feeling, than it's the time to change something.
Making UserControl for repeatable part is one way.
Another is to differ design and run time (what you see in designer): to example, if you have several panels, which has to be shown at same place, then you can use dynamic container for them (FlowLayoutPanel, TableLayoutPanel) or you can have them placed in a way for you to easily see them in design-time, but their position will be corrected during run-time (to example, in the constructor). Prioritizing designing is a must if you are going to support project and edit functionality in next versions.
p.s.: talking about winforms, but all said should be true for wpf as well.
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
What I need can probably be described as "reverse-anchor", "reverse-dock" or something like that (I have chosen to mention this just because "reverse-anchor" happened to be the first thing to come into my mind as a keyword candidate when searching for questions and answers that might already have been submitted discussing this subject, perhaps this will help people thinking a similar way to find this one in future). WinForms controls implement the Anchor property to set up adaptive resizing on containing control/form size change but I need the opposite - the form to resize adaptively to the controls.
A thing adding a minor bit of complexity to the task is that the controls meant to be added/removed/shown/hidden/enabled/disabled (and resized perhaps - this functionality is not really needed directly so far but I suspect it can turn to be required for compatibility with non-default Windows visual styles and themes that have potential to affect controls sizes unpredictably and can change at any moment of the app running) are not going to be the last ones on the form - a row of buttons will always be in between of the last control of the volatile group and the window lower border.
The actual task is to design a form that will display a collection of objects with a row of controls (a label, a text box and 0-2 buttons) corresponding each of them and it is strongly preferable to use just the very basic "common controls" avoiding grids, lists and stuff like that in this case (wrapping them in an additional container controls like panels is perfectly acceptable though, abstracting them in a separate "user control" can be considered too if this can really make the solution easier, more reliable or otherwise better, using hand-written code manipulating controls and form sizes is perfectly acceptable too (I can hardly expect a "set a magic property and it's done" kind of solution to exist for this task) but I haven't found a reliable algorithm so far (when to change what properties and what formulae to calculate new values with)).
The maximum capacity can be safely limited to something near 10 (or 20, perhaps, but not more - more would be just absolutely unreasonable to display on one form (provided scrolling is not an option)) so both ways are acceptable: to add/remove the controls in runtime or to put them on the form in the designer and just manipulate Visible and/or Enabled properties in the code. By the way I have found a problem with Visible - it gets switched off and back on by the framework internals before the form is rendered and other controls Anchor properties come in the game but I don't think it's a good idea to rely on this to happen always and the same way so just adjusting the form Size property on a control Visible property change does not feel really convenient).
What might be some good ideas relevant to implementing this behaviour?
PS: As far as I know this is a natural feature of WPF but I am to use WinForms to make the app runnable on Macs and, perhaps, other non-Windows platforms with help of Mono.
I'll tell you about some clues may help you:
1- correct to build your own Procedure for manipulating all the matter.
2- i advice to use a Wizard methodology (Next / Back buttons) so if the plate form is small like tablet or smart phone, so the mentioned procedure will decide how many Controls combinations (Label, text box, option button...) will be in each frame of that wizard and keep the remaining for Next button.
3- By the way if you will hide some controls use the original event fires to run the mentioned Procedure. (like a basic button to start the form so don't depend on visible / resize events).
4- Resize the size of each form of the wizard in the last part of the mentioned procedure.
If still a problem exists tell me and i hope i can help :-)
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 have a TabControl containing Prism regions. I want to trigger some kind of notification (e.g. flashing the tab header) for certain events, and I want to trigger this notification from the components in the Prism regions.
Once the tab containing such a component was open once, this works nicely using VisualTreeUtil.GetParent() and going up until I find my TabControl and can modify it to indicate the notification.
But the problem is that this doesn't work until the tab is opened by the user because VisualTreeUtil.GetParent() returns null; obviously because Prism doesn't hook up the visual tree until then.
Calling UpdateLayout() on the TabItem containing the region doesn't help. I don't want to open the TabItems programmatically, because this would confuse the user.
Is there anything I can do short of implementing a kind of region registry (which would be rather ugly and harder to maintain)?
If you want to look at code, I wrote a minimal solution to demonstrate the issue. The Print Structure button tries to go up the visual tree from the (initially unrendered invisible) hello TextBlock on the second tab. Before you switch to the tab it prints only the TextBlock, afterwards you get to the root of the visual tree. This is what I want to accomplish without switching to the tab.
Adding comment as answer:
This probably isn't exactly the answer you are looking for, but it seems like you're taking a very procedural approach.
Have you considered using an MVVM approach? Each TabItem in the TabControl can have a HeaderTemplate. In the template you can bind to a property in the ViewModel that causes the tab to flash or change appearance
Hm.. IIRC Prism regions are just a configured ContentControl/ContentPresenter. Once they are ready to work, all the bindings and datamodels should be in place, but the trees are left not created because they are invisible. If so, you should be able to call ApplyTemplate() on them to force it. I do not remember, however, if the Prism assigns the contenttemplates/datacontexts upon init, or upon demand - the latter may cause calling ApplyTemplate useless.
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.