I am wondering what is the most efficient way to create a multi-panel interface for my C# application. The application will be broken up into areas of functionality and i want each interface to appear in a panel or something. What is the best way to achieve this?
The accordion on the left is where the user will navigate the different parts of the application.
As you can see it has 5 buttons (just an example of what i want). Each button will change the content of the panel on the right and change the ribbon control with the relevant buttons.
I'm sorry if this is a bit vague, i tried to explain it as best as i can.
Regards
I would suggest to implement each interface as a UserControl and instantiate it dynamically. On your mainform you should provide a panel to display the control in. This way you can seperate different functionalities in different classes and have an easy way to display it.
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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
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.
I am writing a program that has like 8 tabs in one form. Each tab does different functionality so as you know it requires a lot of methods/variables/classes/background workers etc..
I used to write similar programs before but the MainForm.cs file had a lot of code and it made it very messy( a lot of controls, on click events, etc..)
What is the best way to organize the code in such case?
Are there any documents or examples to follow?
Please let me know!
If everything HAS to be in one class, I'd try partial classes out. You can make a new .cs file for every tab and add it to your project, but everything will still be in the same class.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wa80x488.aspx
Create user controls for each tab page and place all control in their separate user control for each page. Thus, your code will be separated in their usercontrol. You can also invoke their method and handles it's events from your main form.
The best solution I've found is MDI Child Forms. Each tab can be created as a separate form then added during initialization. I also believe you can drop these into a tab form, see here.
Good luck!
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.
In my C# class, we use Visual Studio. My teacher says it is really not good practice to be stacking controls or panels on top of each other and hiding and showing them when needed. They say it should all be kept to separate forms. However, this puzzles me. I can understand that if you are in design mode, it is a little strange to see all these controls on top of each other, but you edit them all separately, so I don't see the issue. I think its really odd to be closing and opening forms like that and it looks a bit strange to the user.
Say you had an application in which you wanted to use multiple controls on top of each other. Say for example it was a login/register form and you didn't want to use a tab control, for whatever reason, and you wanted buttons in the menu strip to switch between the login or register user control, wouldn't it make sense to simply hide/show user controls?