I am able to move a button onto the title bar using the margin and transform features of WPF. However, when I try it, the button is indeed on the titlebar, but it does not get clicks or mouse hovers because its out of the client area. If I double click on it, it just maximizes/restores the window, as if the window is the first one to get the events. Is there some way (without excessive tricks) to achieve what I tried to describe?
Not long after I found out the way to do this:
I downloaded http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/WPFShell binaries, and added the dll as a reference.
I followed the sample source guides and realized that I needed to write e.g. <TabControl shell:WindowChrome.IsHitTestVisibleInChrome="True"> to get the clicks and actions get through to my components :)
Not exactly what you need but maybe it could be a possible direction:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/80255/Add-Your-Control-On-Top-Another-Application
Related
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 have a view and within the view, there are two user control, each with a button on it. When the page loads, the first user control will load. when i click on the button in the first user control, I would like to slide the first user control left, making it invisible and display the second user control. when i click on the button in the second user control, I would like to slide the second user control right, making it invisible and displaying the first user control again. can anyone help on how to achieve this?
If I get correctly, you want something like Carousel in wpf. In case that's it, here's the link. It allows you to slide several items left-right to switch between them.
Another way to go would be using default animations in WPF, meaning DoubleAnimation applied to Margin property that increases margin from 0 to 500 (to move it off the screen) and back to 0 (to return it) or something like that. Head's up for double animation and moving controls is here and official documentation here.
Rather than hard-code an animation designed for your specific scenario, you could do something a little more generic and adapt the TransitionControl that uses pixel shaders. Set the content property and you can specify which shader effect you want it to apply as the transition.
I am trying to recreate Chrome's method of displaying the "status text" of the web page with a WebBrowser control.
These are two methods I am trying to recreate:
Displays the text in a box in the bottom right (or left depending on cursor position) corner
Displays URL of hyperlinks when hovered over
My method:
As of now I have thought of using a ToolTip control and displaying the text within that ToolTip using the WebBrowser.StatusTextChanged event. Obviously this is a somewhat crude way to go about doing this.
So that leads me to two questions:
1: Using my current method, how could I set the position of the ToolTip to appear in the bottom-left corner of the WebBrowser control. (Note I'm using .NET 2.0)
2: What would be a more efficient way of doing this besides the method I've came up with so far?
I think you can simply use a Label and put it over your WebBrowser control, somewhere at the bottom. You'll have to take into consideration the webbrowser's horizontal scroll bar (there is a WebBrowser.ScrollBarsEnabled property and then you can obtain the size of the scrollbar via SystemInformation.HorizontalScrollBarHeight and positin the label so that it doesn't overlap the scrollbar).
I don't think that using ToolTips is a good idea because they have some limitations (they dissapear after a certain (system-defined) amount of time, they are always on top).
I feel quite limited by the default ContextMenuStrip, as it only can contain buttons, and no Controls.
I was wondering that for a long time, and I already tried it, using forms, but it never really worked out.
I already have I idea on how to set the whole thing up, with events and items. The only problem I have is the paint method.
When you open a ContextMenu (ContextMenuStrip) you can set its position on the mouse cursor, and it will be there, even if that means that it goes beyond the active form. (So I can't use the Controls Class as inheritance, as they can only draw themself as a part of a form.
Now I thought to use the Form Class as a base for my ContextMenu, but those where placed on the screen randomly.
So what I actually need is a class (or something similar) that can draw itself, without problems, and can be placed accurately on the screen.
Any hint would be nice, thanks.
Greg the Mad
Your first statement is false -- you can have a TextBox or a ComboBox in a ContextMenuStrip.
MSDN ToolStripComboBox
MSDN ToolStripTextBox
From the designer there is a small drop-down arrow when your mouse is in the "Type Here" box (sometimes hard to click) that will allow you to change the type.
If you are looking to allow for any type of control to be displayed in a top down fashion inside of a container to be positionable... you could always make a custom control using FlowLayoutPanel. With it's properties FlowDirection=TopDown and WrapContents=False to keep a vertical approach. This will handle your "menu" basics and your new control can expose whichever events you wish from each Control. You will have to handle the logic of showing the panel and positioning with it's Location property as well.
I forgot to address the issue with drawing outside of the parent form. Notice that ContextMenus are smart and when they reach a boundary of their parent they draw away from it. You should logically be able to draw in the correct direction (Up/Down or Left/Right) from any right mouse click. Per your attempt with a Form, set StartPosition=Manual then prior to calling Show() or ShowDialog() set it's Location property respective to the X and Y parameters provided in the event args of MouseClick.
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.