How can it be done? If there are, for example, four groups of buttons in menu-like panel. How would you dock them to their initial location if the window is resized?
I am trying this using DockPanel and HorizontalAlign, but it seems to only be work for the last button on the right when the window is resized. But how do you dock(anchor) a group of buttons? Maybe put them in border object and use HorizontalAlign for it? Is there more elegant way to do this?
To summarize the comments: I don't know your background but it seems you are used to another way of UI design where you do not explicitely have to specify grouping etc in code. While that might seem more elegant, it is not: the designer generated code is awful and the whole system is not as flexible nor srtaightforward as what WPF gives you..
With WPF you get a clear one-to-one relationship between your intent (treating buttons as a group within a layout) and the actual code (put the buttons in a stackpanel/grid/...). Or draw a border around buttons and organize them vertically within the border vs in xaml use a border with a stackpanel inside. It won't get any more elegant than that.
Read up on WPF layouts and once you'll get a grip of it you will quickly see that it is rather powerful and beatiful at the same time. I found this tutorial pretty helpful when just starting with layouts. And google provides lots and lots and lots more information, as usual.
Like stijn said, put the buttons in a Grid or a Stackpanel and you'll be fine.
You may not think it's beautifull, but it's the best solution for your problem.
Related
I'm rather new to Xamarin Forms and I am finding some of the rigidness of the UI to be difficult to deal with and would like some expert input. Basically what i'm trying to make is a preferably sleek menu UI like Example Menu (crudely drawn in MS paint) that is nothing more than a list of menu options, and when you click one, the ones below it slide or move down a bit to make room for an area with additional descriptive text. Also, if the menu option opens up and the other options no longer fit on the screen, I would want them to remain out of scope in a ScrollView.
Now my issue is that I don't really know the best way to go about it. My thoughts:
I am currently attempting to nest a grid inside of a scroll view and formulate some kind of function that will add an empty row definition under the indexed menu option button, and populating the empty row. Basically using adding/removing grid rows to handle the 'expanding and contracting' of the menu option. I am struggling to get this function bug free right now but I am wondering if animating this action is possible with a smooth easing sliding motion or if I should explore better easier options. It seems silly to constantly clear the grid and re-add all of the update rowdefinitions each time.
I am curious if perhaps dynamically changing the specific buttons row height when clicked might be cleaner than adding/removing rows. Or using a listview and changing the listview cell's height when clicked. Or would a stacklayout work best in this case since it is technically a stack of buttons. Is it best to add/remove rows or are there easier/better ways to handle this?
Essentially, I am looking for some pointers on which direction I should take that makes the most convenient sense. I chose to start with a grid because it seemed easiest to work with in this case but when looking to animate the menu option and make a sleek smooth menu I am starting to have doubts.
Thanks!
p.s. If someone can also provide or link me a relevant example of how an animation in this case would go down it would be greatly appreciated
I have a panel, which I add controls programmatically to it. I want each control stay in a far from other controls and not stay on top of them.
for this purpose I can calculate a position for each control based on Panel's size, but it seems a bit odd.
Is there a way to make controls be added in a line and when it ended they be added in another line?
You can use a FlowLayoutPanel to achieve what you're describing. It's under Containers in the ToolBox. Set the direction to horizontal and it will flow from left to right, and wrap when it needs to.
I believe the WrapPanel class does what you're describing in WPF. Or the FlowLayoutPanel in WinForms.
You have a few options. You can use one of the containers such as FlowLayoutPanel or TableLayoutPanel. You can also nest them in each other. And you have to set the Margin property for each control you add to the containers.
Sadly the Windows Forms technology lacks on this part a little, while WPF has a very rich layout system. Even somethings like Margin doesn't always work as expected.
I just switched over to WPF from just regular C# .NET for the more advanced UI design controls. I have managed to become extremely confused over what should be extremely simple, and I hope someone can help.
Basically I want to have sections on either side (for the most part these will be list-boxes inside of expanders), one list-box in the bottom-middle, and then a large rich text box taking up the middle.
My understanding was that I could just take a DockPanel, set the ChildFill to true, dock each one where it should go, and leave the last one to fill the space. The list boxes alone don't seem to work at with the DockPanel, and the DockPanel does not seem to expand when I change the size of the window.
So basically my questions are...
1) Why does the DockPanel not expand/shrink when I change the size of the window?
2) Buttons seem to work fine in the Dock Panel (like all of the examples I found) but using List Boxes instead does not seem to work properly. Why is this?
3) If I put the list boxes inside of Expanders instead, if I have say two of these on the left side, and I shrink the top expander, will the bottom expander grow upwards to fill the gap?
I can't really afford anything like ActiPro, and I was not able to get the AvalonDock controls to show up on the MSVC 2010 toolbar, so I am pretty much stuck using the default controls.
1). I have just tested the DockPanel and it does expand / shrink when the Window is resized - Have you removed the Grid that is placed in the Window by default in Visual Studio? If you mean it doesn't resize proportionally to the Windows size then i think you will need to use a Grid.
2). Again, list boxes work fine for me - Can you provide some more detail explaining why they don't work properly?
3). It depends on what you mean by "Grow upwards". If the top expander is closed, only the header will be displayed and the bottom expander will move up to take the space taken by the first expanders content (this is the default behaviour).
Do you have some XAML you can post as this will help identify your problems.
Just ran into a bunch of random but probably very simple questions while learning to work with WPF. If anyone can answer any of these it would be most appreciated.
I have a Rectangle that I styled to my liking, and then a StackPanel that I am actually placing the content (bunch of labels) in. It looks like Rectangle doesn't have a closing statement so how can I make it the parent of the StackPanel (I want the panel to move with it)?
I need to display text (labels) in a table form. It will only be two columns, and 8 rows (row count may change). I initially looked into just using a Grid, but as this is a intended for Layouts, it didn't work as expected. I also checked out DataGrid, but this seems confusing and overly complicated for my needs. Is there any simple Table style element I can use?
I have some Animated Expanders and I want to give the other UI content elements in my application a similar looking title bar. I haven't seen any sort of element for this, so I am wondering if I just need to use a Label or something and style it as close as possible to match, or if something already exists that I should use instead. If I need to use a label, what is the proper way to group/attach it with the element that it is the title bar for?
Do any controls exist for WPF that would allow for a Mac style menu bar? Something similar to where the icons move and expand as they are mouse over.
I have a grid that has two expanders (one above the other) with Height="Auto", and two rows set to Height="Auto" so that when the top is minimized, the bottom one moves up to close the gap. I am using a MinHeight right now to make sure they are at least somewhat expanded, but I would like to make them take up the full 100% of the Grid height. What should I do for this?
A rectangle cannot have child content, a better approach might be to use a Border, you can use this as that parent of your stackpanel, applying a Background and BorderBrush to make it look like a rectangle.
For a simple table layout Grid is the way to go. Is your problem that you need it to be dynamic? If so, you can create multiple grids with SharedSizeGroup on the columns to make them look like a single grid. See: How to align separate Grids created via templates along their columns / rows?
Learn about creating your own templates!
Not that I know of, but it would be relatively simple to do, create a storyboard that scales the item on mouse over.
No idea ... running out of steam!
As Andrzej Nosal mentioned, these really should be separate questions!
hii
I am a fresher in the c # so i want to know how to resize the datagrid(any other control)aith respect to the form size.
I just added one datagrid in the form then what i have to do?please help me...from the very basic please
For a dynamic layout that scales with your form size you have various options (depending on the complexity of your layout).
The first ones are
Anchoring
Docking.
But you can also work with advanced container controls like
TableLayoutPanel
FlowLayoutPanel
SplitContainer.
Some more informations i already post in an older question.
If you have more concrete problems about how to solve a specific layout problem you should post a new question with your exact problem.
But at a first tip i can say that it is never necessary to use the Resize event and do some size changes on yourself. There is always a solution that can be solved with the above elements.
You have to ways of dong it:
Using a Dock. It works fine and is very easy to use but its limit is that you can stick it to a one side of parent container. So if you want to streach control only in width you will fail.
Using Anchor. It require more configuration but you can specify all four(top, right, down, bottom option separably.
Regards
Szymon
Go to the properties window and scroll down to "Docking" and choose to dock the control in the parent container. This will give you various options about how you want the control to dock. You should put some containers in there of some sort, maybe, if you've got buttons or things you'd like to have show up above/below/next to the grid. Also, if your grid goes behind your other controls, select the control and bring it to the front.
edit:
You need some containers in which to put your buttons / drop-downs. You could use a flow-layout panel (which wouldn't resize its child controls), or you could use a plain panel or the table-layout panel. The table one will let you dock your child controls within each cell of the table, and you can set your columns & rows to auto-size to a percentage of the entire table width. That way everything will autosize accordingly.