I'm creating something like a wizard, and I'm using several User Control, but the roblem is I need to get the parent from that element to replace for the next user control.
How can I do that?
Lets think you have 5 UserControls. While creating wizard you need to add new UserControl inside a grid and remove the previous UserControl from the same parent grid.
The following function will automatically remove the older UserControl and add the new UserControl.. But for the first UserControl you can directly add it to its parent using MyParentPanel.Children.Add(myFirstUserControl);
private void AddNewUserControlAndAutoRemoveOldUserControl(UserControl control)
{
if (control != null)
{
Panel parent = control.Parent as Panel;
if (parent != null)
{
// Removing old UserControl if present
if(parent.Children.Count > 0)
parent.Children.RemoveAt(0);
parent.Children.Insert(0, control);
}
}
}
}
Hope this helps you!
Well, there are various ways you can accomplish a wizard, but the simplest would be to manage the UserControls from your main form. Just add an area to the main form that will be the parent of each user control and then add/remove a user control from the container when necessary.
The most elegant way to do this (I'd say the best) is using a Selector or a ListBox.
Your wizard will have several pages, each one exposes one or more informations, thus controls bound to some data. In other words, you should consider having a "model" containing the data, where the pages will bind to.
Now, consider having a distinct model for each page, and a list of these models feeding the ListBox. This ListBox should have defined its ItemTemplateSelector, that allows to choose a certain DataTemplate upon the item data (i.e. the model).
The hardest part of this technique is to create/define the Control template for the ListBox, that should be shaped for displaying only the selected item (SelectedItem). In such a way, you only have to change the current selection, and the wizard page will show automatically.
Although this technique appears an overkill, it is dramatically convenient respect to the "classic" approach. Your code is much more clean, easier to debug, reutilizable, and offers high separation between modules. All that will give much more reliability, and fast development.
Related
I use a Contentcontrol to show the user controls of the program, Now there is a problem for me to close the user controls After searching, I found an example that The user controls is loaded on a DockPanel
Now my questions:
What is the difference between these two controls? (Dockpanel vs ContentControl)
Is it okay to use this control(dockpanel) Instead of Contentcontrol to display application user controls?
Is there a similar code for Contentcontrol?
ucChild ChildWindow = new ucChild();
ChildWindow.ParentControl = this.UIPanel;
UIPanel.Children.Clear();
UIPanel.Children.Add(ChildWindow);
Standard disclaimer for people coding WPF like it is WinForms: First off; direct UI manipulation like this is a bad idea. You should
be modifying a view model and allowing the binding system to update
the UI. Use the MVVM pattern; WPF will work for you instead of
against you
To your actual questions:
Everything. I mean; they both inherit from FrameworkElement but that's about it in terms of commonality.
A DockPanel is as the name suggests, a Panel. That is; it controls the layout and sizing of one or more child elements. Specifically, DockPanel is good at situations like the following: you want an element to use up a full column of width, then another span the top (except for the previous element) and have the last element fill the remaining space.
A ContentControl is basically a placeholder, its purpose is to expose a settable (and most importantly, bindable) Content property that you can stuff another control into. Even better; you can put an actual object there and use a DataTemplate to control the display (this approach would conform to MVVM).
You can't really replace one with the other, see above
No. ContentControl is not a Panel and so does not have the Children property.
I'm working on a WinForms C# UserControl that will function like a Delphi PageControl (a panel that swaps between multiple pages, but only one page is visible at a time). I want the user to be able to drop components onto a page at design time.
I have it mostly working, but am having trouble with the serialization. I'm using a List for my pages and am serializing out this list like so:
[Browsable(false)]
[DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Content)]
public List<Panel> Pages { get { return _pages; } set { _pages = value; } }
And I allow the user to interact with the panels using a custom Designer descended from ParentControlDesigner. I have the Designer call a SetDesigner method of the PageControl and the PageControl stores a reference to the designer so that it can call EnableDesignMode on any panels it creates.
My problem is, EnableDesignMode's name parameter. I'm not sure what to put there. These panels are elements of a List and don't have names that can be referenced by pageControl1.Name. I've tried setting the names to "Pages[0]", "Pages[1]", etc. but that crashes during serialization.
Any ideas on how I should handle this? Long story short: How can I have a dynamic list of child panels that the user can interact with at design time and have the designer remember the settings and child controls on these panels?
Edit
To be more clear about what I'm trying to do, I want to create a UserControl that acts as a Panel, but has multiple "pages". When the user changes its PageIndex property, it switches to an entirely different Panel and the user can add different controls. Something that could be used for a wizard or something where one panel could have multiple views.
I am looking to create a windows form. This form is to display groups of data separately and I was aiming to do so in the same form window rather than have multiple windows open.
For example each group of data is defined by a Job#. A user will want to review X different Job#'s at a time (Range would usually be 1-5, but could be more). I would like to have 4 dataGridViews for each Job# plus various identifying and summed data in text boxes. Initial Example Concept
I was looking into using TabPages/Tab Controls. My initial idea was to have a user click the different tabs to view the data for those jobs that they have pre-selected. However these tabs don't seem to behave like classes from what I can see. Is there perhaps a better way to go about this or some way to have the tabs act like classes? So that each tab has a Job TextBox, 4 Different DataGridViews, etc. So that I can easily create and display any number of jobs?
For example each Tab would have 4 dataGridViews, maybe 8 Text Boxes, Standardized Labels and a Standardized layout.
So would using tabs be a good idea? Using some other WinForm control?
There are at least 2 solutions here:
Create a custom Panel holding all the controls you want (TextBox, DataGridView, ...), design it so that it looks best to you. Then add each of that Panel to each of TabPage of your TabControl.
Create a new custom TabPage and add the custom TabPage to your TabControl.TabPages instead of the standard TabPage.
I think the second approach can be done if you can initialize everything using code (not by drag-n-drop) because to get the drag-n-drop supported, you may need to write a custom TabControl. So the first approach is feasible and OK. You can replace the Panel by a Form, set the Form.TopLevel = false, you can add that form to any container control. Using Form, you can benefit the easiness of drag-n-drop to design and organize your controls.
Here is a little of code which may help you figure out:
public class TabPageClient : Form {
public TabPageClient(){
InitializeComponent();
Dock = DockStyle.Fill;
TopLevel = false;
FormBorderStyle = FormBorderStyle.None;
}
//.... other code
//I think this is important
//You should define some Properties and methods to control the data flowing into and out from your TabPageClient.
//You can also support some method to add/remove the controls dynamically.
}
Take the drag-n-drop requirement into account, I think using UserControl may be better:
public class TabPageClient : UserControl {
public TabPageClient(){
InitializeComponent();
Dock = DockStyle.Fill;
}
}
For UserControl, you should place the class in a separate *.cs file, compile your project and then you can see it in the ToolBox window (at the very top). Just drag and drop it like as other controls.
Personally, I prefer grid-detail views. Something we make heavy use of in our software. The form has a SplitContainer in vertical alignment.
In the top panel, you add a list of some kind (ListBox, ListView, DataGridView...any control into which you can load a list and then react to selection).
In the bottom panel, you have yet more options. Simplistically, you could use a TableLayoutPanel and then setup rows/columns to provide whatever arrangement of embedded controls you like, such as your array of grids to display data. I suppose in keeping with your model, you'd have a single ColumnStyle and four (4) RowStyles. Then in each row, add a grid.
This way, you keep it all in one place...one "screen", if you like (no tabs to flip through). You react to the selection in the list to decide what data to display in the grids. You then just need a bit of code (a class I would hope) that interfaces between the class(es) that provide the data, and the form controls that display it (the grids).
An additional benefit here is that with the list presentation, you can have a lot more than five (5) jobs in play at any one time. In fact, with scrolling, as many as you like (not limited to the number of tabs before the display goes to pot).
Also, you would be re-using the grids. Simply refreshing the displayed data for the list item selected. You could even pre-load and cache it all if freshness is not an issue.
Also consider binding directly to data source if that's an option.
I have some problems trying to update components of surface elements. I dont know if my approach to the problem is wrong, since I'm new to the topic.
My point is represented by the following diagram
According to the option that is selected in the menu, load different user controls as only child of StackPanel but i'm habing problems for update the Listview from loaded user controls, example: when I save a new item I need to recharge the list of items in the ListView
MVVM would be a good pattern here. If you have a problem passing data between controls - why not introduce them on top of unified data layer? Consider this:
Three radio buttons in your Menu, each one's IsChecked property bound to Visibility property of your respective UserControl.
StackPanel holding all three UserControls
ListView bound to ViewModel's List<Item>
Each of your UserControls bound to ListView.SelectedItem: one of them using TextBlock for read-only, one using TextBox for editing. Third one would create new item in your List<Item>. You would have to create ItemTemplate for each or create one UserControl (since they look very much alike) and use DataTemplateSelector.
If you're not familiar with MVVM here is a good start. You can also use one of the existing frameworks like MVVM Light
You can create an event on your child
public delegate void HandleNAMEOFYOURHANDLEEVENT();
on your child class
public event HandleNAMEOFYOURHANDLEEVENT yourInstance;
to use it on your child class
if (!ReferenceEquals(yourInstance, null))
{
yourInstance();
}
and you declare it on your parent like other event.
I have created two separate UserControls and (depending on which RadioButton is selected) I would like one or the other to be displayed.
Right now, I simply dragged one instance of each UserControl onto the form and placed one on top of another (setting one .Visible = false;).
This is OK, but I was wondering if there was a better or more appropriate way to do this?
That's perfectly reasonable.
If you're concerned about keeping around resources you're no longer using, you can add a Panel and add or remove the control from there.
E.g.
try
{
panel.SuspendLayout();
panel.Controls.Remove(userControl1);
panel.Controls.Add(userControl2);
}
finally
{
panel.ResumeLayout();
}
If the user controls do things like connect to data sources, you might want to actually dispose and recreate them. Really depends on how complex the controls are. If they're just capturing a few properties, your current solution is fine.