I have been looking around for a solution to this but fail to find it anywhere.
I am currently making a management program for an organization which handles kids with special needs. They need to keep track of a lot of data, etc.
I have placed the data in a GroupBox with TableLayout using Drag N' Drop. However the elements do not align. The left side seems to be docked in the upper left corner of a cell while the right side seems to be docked in the lower right corner of a cell.
How would I solve this so they are both centered in their respective cell?
The alignment of controls placed in a TableLayout cell can be influenced by the anchor setting of these controls.
You can align your controls Middle-Center by setting the Anchor property of your Labels and TextBoxes to None.
Related
I have a C# winforms application that has table layout panel. The panel is set so that there are two columns, with a 75/25 % split. In the larger section is a docked panel that holds some controls, while the smaller section has a docked panel with a single label. We push a wall of text to the label on the right and it is getting jammed up ugly.
I've adjusted the controls on the large section and recovered some space that I want to give over to the label panel. The "Completed" and "Inspected" labels and dropdowns are not in use, and set to invisible currently. I used designer to adjust the split on the table layout panel to be 65/35 %, but the docked panel and the label didn't change position on the layout.
What I want to happen is for the table layout panel to have a larger portion of the split given over to the label and the label to fill the new space when text is set to it.
The results of my efforts haven't gone very far. I adjusted the split %, but the label looks unchanged. It seems to be the exact same size it was before making changes. It looks like the label maintained the same position as well, stuck to the right hand border of the panel. The label definately isn't extending past where it originally ended/started with the 75/25 split.
The sub panel and the label are set up to fill and anchor top/left. The panel is docked to the table layout panel. I was under the impression that the docking and filling would account for the change in the split, but I'm wrong about that I guess. I feel like this whole problem has some root in these settings, but my tinkering with them hasn't changed anything that I can tell.
Following the instructions provided by LarsTech, I adjusted the settings on the layout panel to be absolute pixel value on the left hand side and 100% on the right. I then set the panel anchor to top, right. I set the label itself to dock = fill. The label is now stretching across the entire area covered by the blue arrow.
Thanks again. Would give a +1 to your comment if I could.
How does one specify that a button centers itself in a container without having to specify a Location? Is it even possible?
The goal is to be able to center multiple buttons in a panel without having to perform calculations on their placement.
I know it is possible to center some controls on a form, not sure about a panel though. Anyway:
Disable the Left and Right anchors of your control if you want your controls to stay centered horizontally, and the Top and Bottom anchors if you want your controls to stay centered vertically,
In the designer window, select your control,
In the VS 'Format' menu, hit 'Center in form', then 'Horizontally' and/or 'Vertically'.
If you want to center several controls side to side, select them all and execute the above steps.
Controls will then stay centered in the form when the user resizes the window.
I'm not 100% sure of what you are asking, but try using a TableLayoutPanel, and drop one button in each cell of the table. If you anchor the TableLayoutPanel to the Top, Left, Bottom& Right, the Table will grow and shrink with the form, but each button will "float" relative to the top-left corner of it's containing cell.
Disabling all anchoring will keep the TableLayoutPanel at it's relative location within your form, but your buttons will remain spaced out evenly amongst one another.
Between standard control anchoring and/or the the TableLayoutPanel you should be able to find the correct type of anchoring that you desire.
I have a simple winforms app with a column of several buttons. What is the nicest way to enforce that they are equally spaced vertically?
Drag a rectangle around them in the designer so they all get selected. Use Ctrl + Left mouse click to adjust the selection if necessary. In the menu: Format + Vertical Space + Make Equal.
If you want to make the spacing dynamic (ie: it updates when the user changes the size of the window) the best approach would be to create a TableLayoutPanel with 5 rows (and probably just one column). Set its Dock property to Fill, and make sure each row has automatic size.
After that, you place your buttons on the panel, and it will do the positioning for you.
Set the top and bottom margins on each control to the same thing, and then drag them together using snaplines to line them all up.
Change the location parameters in the properties windows to be proportionally aligned.
Starting from scratch in a new project in which the properties of the default Form1 form have not been altered I drop a SplitContainer on the form and set its properties to:
Anchor - Top, Left
Dock - Fill
Orientation - Vertical
I then drop a second SplitContainer into the left-hand panel (panel 1) of the first SplitContainer and again set its properties to those above except this time the orientation of the splitter is set to horizontal.
I now place two CheckedListBoxes in both the upper and lower panels (panels 1 & 2) of the second SplitContainer. The properties of both CheckedListBoxes are set to:
Anchor - Top, Left
Dock - Fill
I now add a TextBox to the right-hand panel (panel 2) of the first SplitContainer and set its properties to:
Anchor - Top, Left
Dock - Fill
Multi-Line - True
When I compile and run this application the vertical splitter which forms part of the first SplitContainer I added behaves and works exactly as expected - so no problem there.
However, the horizontally oriented splitter in the second SplitContainer consistently displays erratic behaviour - the width of the splitter itself changes as it is moved up and down. But this increase or decrease in the width of the splitter is also not consistent with the direction in which it was moved - for example moving it up some distance from its initial position at startup may result in the splitter being thinner than what it was previously while a further resizing upwards results in it being thicker.
The bottom edge of the lower CheckedListBox also moves up and down when I move the splitter and as before this behaviour is not consistent with the direction in which the splitter is moved.
To avoid carrying over changes to a component's properties from one experiment to another I have been trying to figure out what is going on by starting half a dozen or so new projects from scratch and trying out different things including changes to the Anchor, BorderStyle, Dock, and Margin properties, but unfortunately I am none the wiser : -(
Has anyone had similar experience of this erratic behaviour and can offer me a solution? I might be overlooking something simple, if so what is it?
Thanks for reading.
Edit \ Update -
Upon further experimentation I was able to determine that the unwanted behaviour I am experiencing is related somehow to the CheckedListBoxes - I replaced both with multi-line textboxes whose properties of "Anchor" and "Dock" were set to "Top, Left" and "Fill" respectively and upon running the app the erratic behaviour no longer occurs - both the vertical and horizontal splitters are working correctly.
Set the IntegralHeight property of the list boxes to False so that they are allowed to size themselves to fit the panel.
How might I design a UI in C#/WinForms which happens to contain several different control types such that only the ListView control gets resized if the user resizes the window?
There are two primary ways to make a control automatically resize based on size changes of the parent container (a Form in your case):
Set the Dock property of the control to DockStyle.Fill.
Set the Anchor property to "Top, Bottom, Left, Right"
Use the Dock property with Dock.Fill
The advantage of this method is that it takes the entire control and tells it to always fill the entire client area of the parent container (in your case, the Form client area). That's useful if you want to do something like fill a Form with a ListControl or TreeView or something like that. But it's not as useful if you want to scale a single control while using other controls (as you indicate is your need). In that case, you would need to set the Dock property on those other controls to DockStyle.Top or DockStyle.Bottom to have them float above or below your main resizing control.
That's a hassle and it also limits the layout options of the other controls. You can mitigate that problem by docking two Panel controls, one at the top and another at the bottom of the Form. Those panels will remain in fixed positions while the middle area (with your DockStyle.Fill control) scales with the parent Form. You can then put any controls in any layout configuration in those "header" and "footer" panels.
This kind of composite form-building using docked panels is incredibly powerful. Quite frankly, it was game changing in .NET when they introduced this with .NET 1.0 WinForms.
Use the Anchor property with "Top, Bottom, Left, Right"
If all you want to do is have a single control on a form scale, while others stay "stuck" to the edges, use the Anchor property. For the controls that you want to stay at the top, set the Anchor property to "Top, Left" (the default). For controls that you want to stay at the bottom, set the Anchor property to "Bottom, Left". For controls that you want to grow in width with the form/dialog (such as a single-line textbox control), set the Anchor property to "Left, Right" (and set Top or Bottom depending whether you want it move as the top or the bottom of the dialog changes.
And if you want a control to resize in all directions with a Form, set the Anchor property to "Top, Left, Bottom, Right". Very useful for "main control" type of things, such as a dominant listbox, tree control, or multi-line textbox.
For what you need, don't mess with the AutoSize or AutoSizeMode... those properties control how a control changes size based on its own contents, not how it resizes based on its container's behavior. Think of AutoSize/AutoSize mode as inward looking, while Anchor/Dock are outward looking. You get some very bizarre behavior if you use both sizing methods at the same time. Generally not useful.
Dock the ListView to all four sides of the form, and the other controls to 2 or less.
There is a property on controls called "Anchor" (in "Layout" category) if you set this to "Top, Bottom, Left, Right" it will maintain margins between control and its parent container causing it to resize as container changes size.
But if only one of anchors along one axis is enabled (e.g. "left", but not "right") it will move the control instead, again, preserving locked margins between the control and its container.
In short : exactly what James said, except it is "Anchor" not "Dock" property. Dock is similar but not exactly the same.
IF you put the ListView in one panel of a SplitContainer and put the remaining controls in the other panel you can restrict the growth of the second panel by setting the min and maxsize.
If your ListView is docked Full then it'll take all the increase when the form is resized.
What if we have multiple controls in the form?
For example: If a form is used to generate some result in a grid with respect to the data entered in couple of text-boxes or combo-boxes, etc.;
And we want them to resize/realign accordingly and not overlap each other (as it happens when using the dock-fill), especially with the grid-view or similar control in context.