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.
Related
I've tried looking many places for an answer to an issue I'm having and so far I've found nothing.
What I currently have is a c# windows form with user controls inside it. Some user controls have other controls inside them. What happens when I change the text in a textbox, is its parent windows will no longer resize like they should when changing the window size. i.e. A horizontal scrollbar will appear even though horizontal scrollbars are disabled in that specific window. Its almost as if changing the text changes the parent window's styling.
In case this is too vague, I have a textbox inside a panel with a docking property set to fill. The panel has a padding of 10 in order to allow the textbox to have some white space for aesthetic purposes. This control resides within a parent control (we'll call it parent 1), which in turn resides within another control as well (we'll call it parent 2). So when I change the textbox's text (at all, even adding a space), will then make parent 2 have a horizontal scrollbar flicker and sometimes even remain when resizing the form window manually.
You should make sure that not only the TextBox in the UserControl is docked to fill but also that the user control itself and its parent (and its parent) are Docked correctly or have anchor set so that they resize with the Form.
Do you execute any special code when the user enters a character? (KeyPressed event etc.). If yes you should try disabling the events temporarily to see if they cause the problem.
If you post a sample of your code it would be easier to help. Without this we can only guess, like I tried...
I found out my issue! When using autoScrollBars and double buffering, it caused the horizontal scrollbar to show when it shouldn't have (at least in my case) when resizing the window. The answer was simple, forget the autoScrollBars, and implement my own vertical scroll bar!
I was actually getting some code to post up on here for you guys to look at, but when looking at it, I decided to forget the autoscroll, and lo and behold it worked!
I'm actually curious as to why that is though. My friend heard that .net has some issues with autoScroll but I didn't think it would be to this degree.
Kinda new in Microsoft visual C#. I have made a simple program. Everything is working perfectly fine, unfortunately the tricky part for me is i do not know how to layout my objects properly. I would like to copy the layout of the Microsoft visual C# interface, wherein the panels adjust to their predefined ratio and proportion whenever the main form is re-sized and the user may adjust the width and height of each panel. Any readings or code would be a lot of Help. THANKS A LOT!
You could do a number of things:
Allow automatic layout using something like a FlowLayoutPanel
Allow resizing of controls using a Splitter
Look at custom implementations to provide more advanced functionality Collapsible Splitter
Well follow these tutorial links to know about resizing in windows
using Dock and Anchor property. Along this the layout control will
help you to manage the layout - FlowLayoutPanel and
TableLayoutPanel, Panel, GroupBox etc.
Designing Resizable Windows Forms in Visual Studio .NET
Manage WinForm controls using the Anchor and Dock properties
This one is much better to understand.
For a simple start the anchor property is what you want. so for instance if you set all four anchors for that left hand control, and the parent window changes size it will will resize proportionally.
After that it starts getting complicated. Adding panels and then putting your controls inside them. Setting Dock to left, or top or fill. Grow and shink on scrollable controls. Splitter bars.
And last ditch handling resize events and calculating positions and sizes.
Sit down and have a think about what you want to happen, play around with minimum and maximum height and widths, ie no point in working out waht your form is going to look like when it's postage stamp sized...
PS Don't forget VS allows floating panels, and persists (well some times sort of) user choices in the layout, that's a bigger job.
Place a TableLayoutPanel as the base control, anchor it to all sides, define as many columns and rows as you like with "percentage" sizes.
Then place different sections of your form in different table cells. Properly dock your controls in each cell.
Can also use a split container above table if needed.
The ideal order should be like below
SplitContainer
TableLayoutPanel
Panel
Controls
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.
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.