I need to simulate a form that is similar to the interface seen during installation of any software. There are next and back buttons and the all the information entered by the user is processed only when he/she clicks the finish button. When the user clicks the back button, the previous entered information is showed to him/her. When the user clicks the next button the next screen is show to him/her. All displayed information is shown in one form.
There are 3 section which I need to show the user.
Section 1 - pressing the next button will show section 2
Section 2 - pressing the back button will show section 1 and pressing the next button will show section 3
Section 3 - pressing the previous button will show section 2 and pressing the finish button will process all the information entered in section 1,2 and 3.
Currently planning to implement the solution listed below :
Create one form
Add all the element for section 1 and create a next button event that will hide all the element shown in section 1 including the button and show all the elements section 2.
Create button event for the back button for section 2 such that it hides all the elements in section 2 including the button and displays all the elements in section 1 and the next button to hide all the element in section 2 including the button and show all the element in section 3
Create similar button event for section 3
Are there any better solution than the one describe above. If yes, please describe the approach. Any help provided will be greatly appreciated.
One way to achieve this is using a tab control and hiding the tabs so that the user can't navigate between them and instead you control moving from one tab to the next programatically.
I use the KryptonNavigator control as it provides many different modes that make it simple to hide tabs so that only tab content is visible, etc. However, it should be possible to hide the tabs of the standard tab control.
KryptonNavigator
Sounds like you need a wizard control. Try one of these:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/miscctrl/ak_wizard.aspx
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/195255/best-wizard-control-for-net-windows-forms
You can use usercontrol structure to achieve this kind of behaviour. You can add a simple panel control and change the content of the panel according to the buttons pressed. You can simply change the content of the panel by using yourPanel.Controls.Add(your_user_control).
So different control sets can be implemented on a winform.
Thanks
You could create custom controls for the three different screens, then you could just add those 3 controls to the form, making it easier to hide/show the appropriate controls.
Or alternatively, you can create three separate forms, and then show your forms in order and perform the actions in the programs Main() function rather than using a form as your startup object. Like
static void Main()
{
Form1 f1 = new Form1();
if (f1.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
{
// do actions
// show next form
// etc.
}
}
Yeah, like iain said, the wizard control is probably your best bet, but if that doesn't work, try looking for MultiView or Accordian controls. They make controls that are specifically for hiding/showing sections on a form, so you don't have to go from form to form, and thus you stay in the same scope the whole time. Makes keeping the fields populated a lot easier.
Related
I am new to C# and I am using windows forms.
I don't know if the term "browse" is right to use in this case or not.
I have Form1 with 3 buttons ( buttonA , buttonB and buttonc) in it.
I linked buttonA with a user control which contains 20 buttons and each one of those 20 buttons is linked to a user control which contains 10 buttons each of which does an action which it is clicked, also same thing applies to buttonB and buttonC . Now I configured user controls visibility when button clicked . For example:
Click buttonA user control1 with 20 buttons show up, click one of those 20 buttons another user control show up with 10 buttons.
What I am trying to do is something like browsing windows folders but in this way I will end up having too many user controls and it is confusing and I feel this is not the correct way of doing it. Can anyone please help me if there is another way to do taht? Thank you
What I am trying to do is: I click on
Your scenario seems to be ideal to use TreeView control. This controls displays a hierarchy of items, in your case a hierarchy of products and subprodcuts. A user of your application will be able to expand/collapse nodes as he/she want just by clicking a node. It is much more intuitive and readable than pressing buttons.
For example you can easily achieve the following icons:
You can also associate icons with nodes, change their background or foreground etc.
I think ListView control may fit your needs. It can display a lot of items in different forms (for your task consider using View.LargeIcon or View.Tile for ListView.View property). It also supports groups that may be useful for building POS system.
I want to change my form 1 into form 2. I don't want it to open a new window but keep it in the same window and then be able to go back and forth when I press the Next key or back key. Is the only way to do this by Individually hiding each button and picture?
You might want to consider a different approach.
You can't change one type of form into a different type of form. The closest option would be to close or hide the first and show the second at the same location on the screen.
However, you could approach this differently. Instead of putting your buttons and logic into a form, you could place everything into two UserControl instances, and just change which user control is visible within a single form.
You can use panels, group boxes, TabControls, etc. to group common controls together. When you want to switch between different "screens", you can hide or show the group control by setting the visible property and calling BringToFront(), and it will hide/show all the controls on that group control.
I have created a Windows form using a Tab Control, but it has a header with it. I want to hide it. I am not able to do it using any properties of the Tab Control. Is there any property defined for hiding the tab header for the Tab Control without going through the code?
Use following code to hide the tabs or set these properties in design.
tabControl.Appearance = TabAppearance.FlatButtons;
tabControl.ItemSize = new Size(0, 1);
tabControl.SizeMode = TabSizeMode.Fixed;
You want the tab panels without the feature allowing a user to switch between them, so I suppose you want to create few separate sets of controls to be shown to the user one at a time. You can achieve this in several ways (you can choose one of them if you find it appropriate in your case):
Use several Panel controls instead of several tabs in the TabControl, however, it would be hard to work in the designer, because all the controls would be visible
Use different Forms instead of tabs to keep the layout parts separated. It can be ok, but you may not want to use multiple Forms, so it depends on a specific case.
and finally, the suggested solution:
Encapsulate each set of controls in a UserControl. This allows you to keep each layout separately, so you can easily design each of them without the other controls getting in the way ;). The the code handling each of the layouts would also be separated. Then just drag those controls in the Form and use set their visibilities appropriately to show the one you want.
If none of those suggestions work for you, let me know, so I can look for other possible solutions.
It's more easy as you think, you just drag the panel's window upper, so will be outside of the form.
Use DrawMode: OwnerDrawFixed will hide TabPage header text DrawMode : OwnerDrawFixed
Another way to achieve the same (or similar) is: You can remove tabs from TabControl.TabPages collection and then add the tab you want to show.
During the Form initialization I remove tabs (so into the designer I can easily manage them) and in some control event (as button click) I show the tab the user has to see.
Something like that:
// During form load:
ctrTab.TabPages.Clear();
// ......
// During button click or some other event:
if(rbSend.Checked)
ctrTab.TabPages.Add(pgSend);
else
ctrTab.TabPages.Add(pgReceive);
In this way the user can still see the header tab but just as title of controls group, he can't change/switch the current active tab.
This is what i intend to do .
Form 1 is displayed , requesting some data .
Cliking the next button would display form 2 requesting some more data .
Back button will take it back to form 1 .
Finally at the last form on clicking a finish button , Id like to retrieve all the data and display it in one singe form . I would like to know what is the best design approach should I follow
Ie : Do i have all the controls in a single form and make them visible and invisible .. ?
or should i have multiple forms with global values to be accessed in the end?
I would recommend that you create user controls for each tab except maybe the last and encapsulate all the logic for that tab within the control. Add properties to the control to get the values entered on the form. Add all these user controls to a parent form which handles navigation.
I think you can achieve this by IUIs (Inductive User Interfaces)
Its just like as Dark Falcon has mentioned above.. you can create a parent form and add user controls which would inherit the navigation controls and tabs from the parent.
UI is created in VS 2008. I'm using C# .... I need to let the user move/focus between text fields from top to bottom by clicking tab button. How can i do it?
On the Layout toolbar (will normally show up if you're in Design View) click on the buttom on the most right (it's called tab order).
Now on every element on your designer will come up a little box with a number. Just click all your elements in the order you like and they will automatically be re-ordered.
If you like to do it manually, just take ho1 advice and change the property manually.
You just set up the TabIndex property properly, so that it's sequential from top to bottom. Then it'll work automatically and you won't need any code to move around the focus.
So in other words, set the top TextBox TabIndex to 1, the next one you set to 2 etc and then one at the bottom will have the highest number (of the textboxes, you probably want to have even higher indexes for any OK buttons and similar so that the user can jump to them after editing all the textboxes).
You can find more info about it here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.tabindex.aspx