How to navigate in .net forms? I need to navigate to a page based on selection from a list of options. But creating new forms for each selection doesn't look good. So how to make a better navigation?
Perhaps you are looking for a docking windows library? My team uses this one
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dockpanelsuite/
it is free and suits our needs. It allows you to stack new forms in a "tabbed" way, the user can close the forms/tabs he does not need any more, and you can customize the behaviour in several ways.
How about System.Windows.Forms.TabControl ? You can create and fill the tabs at design time.
You can do it by creating new tab(System.Windows.Forms.TabControl) instance http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa984280(v=vs.71).aspx) on the fly(runtime) like on linklable click and also if you want to check whether it already opened then try iterating with TabControl's all Tabs.
Related
I am developing an application in Windows Form C#, it begins with an explanatory window, language selection and a start button when the desired language is selected, I want that when I press the start button, all the elements disappear and begin the application process, I had thought of creating a new form, but this opens a new window and I don't want that, I want everything to happen on a window. Apart from making all the previous controls invisible, is there any way to achieve this? Or maybe a way to make all the controls invisible without going one by one?
You could put multiple controls in a panel for example and hide/show entire panel.
If you dont want to do that, you could always do it in a loop
for example:
foreach ( var control in this.Controls)
{
control.Visible=false;
}
Ofcourse you could also add controls dynamically, but that might be hard for a beginner.
You could also make use of MDI forms, but that might be also not worth it.
SOLVED
Solved using user controls, user controls allow me to design the application interface in the same way as a form and I can add and remove that control from the form as many times as I want, making it possible to display numerous interfaces in a single Windows Forms window.
This solution was suggested by Jeroen van Langen in the comments of my question and it was exactly what I was looking for.
ı have been serching this for a while but I couldn't come up with a conclusion. What is UserControl? For me we can do everything with creating new windows forms instead of User Control. I know there is a reason to use but it is not clear right now. If someone illuminates the mystery that would be great.
A user control is basically a grouping of other existing control, intended as a reusable component (i.e. composite control). If you need to place the same group of controls on different windows you'd rather group them in a user control, adding things like data validation for instance, and then reuse this control whenever you need it.
Here is some more reading.
UserControls allow you to reuse your code. For example if you need a small component that displays two values (code and description), with UserControls you can design it only one time and then reuse it in other forms.
Also, you can add your custom properties\methods to the UserControl; in this way you can define simple (or even more complex) functions associated to the GUI control.
Hope this helps.
imagine you have a GridView with some new methods you create, and which you want to use on several pages. There you go. A UserControl is useful. That's just one example
As the others have explained a UserControl groups 'real' Controls and the logic that makes them work together as one component.
Imagine an application where the user can decide wether it runs in MDI mode or with separate windows or with tabbed pages. You can add the UCs of your application to any of these easily.
Think of a MP3 player with various controls, buttons, labels and sliders and user drawn-gauges. If it's in a UC you can re-use it directly. If it is all on a window, how do you re-use it?
So UCs are about flexibilty and re-using visual components.
My C# standard windows forms app is finished, it has 10 forms. But the new requirement is now to change the "multiple forms" to one dashboard where you click a link on a bar on the side or top and switch between forms in the main area of the dashboard one at a time, pretty much exactly the same way an old HTML frame works with framesets (just imagine my Windows Forms are framesets).
Without going into much detail, each of these forms are pretty involved, multiple threads and so on, and I am looking for a simple trick to display them, as oposed to recoding the entire thing.
I looked at http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/37397/A-Multipanel-Control-in-C
but it's not what I want.
Is there a way to do this?
If you convert the forms into custom controls, it then becomes pretty simple to use the TabControl http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.tabcontrol.aspx to display the custom controls on the surfaces of the Tabs it contains.
By making them custom controls you avoid the mixing of the code for each of them (they remain distinct) but they also become easily added to other surfaces. I do this with a UI with a dozen display tabs.
I would recommend that you either use a tabbed control, or use an MDI Container, or a combination of both. The MDI has some nice behaviors that you'll get for free by implementing it. You could hard code each tab to each form, or have a dropdown that selects each view. If you want to manage the lifecycle of each form, you could implement a singleton pattern on each, or use IOC.
Not entirely sure this is going to solve your problem, but if you have questions or more details, let me know.
I resolved this using MDI as suggested above, works great in .NET Windows Forms 4.0 and 4.5.1.
In the parent form:
Declare a new child form.
myNewChildForm.MdiParent = this;
set child form StartPosition to Manual.
set child form Location to 0,0.
set child form WindowState to Maximized.
set child form Dock to Dockstyle.Fill
That does the trick.
Thank you all.
I've been searching on the web for a little while for a content control for Windows Phone 7 with multiple pages, where I would be able change content by changing the index, something like a PageControl or a TabControl, but without the tabs, but I had no luck.
The Idea is to give the user multiple views for the content, but I don't want to use the pivot since it will be inside a pivot item. It can't be scrollable.
I would give the user the view options, and the control would show the option he chose.
Does anyone know any kind of control that can do this kind of thing?
Thanks in advance.
You could use a UserControl and just switch the views on that single page. You would have to plumb your own implementation you want. But the controls should be extensible enough for it to be have your own custom implementation there on how it will work.
I would also suggest to go to this MSDN Documentation and check the inheritance of UserControl.
More specifically, to make it easier for you check Caliburn Micro to make it easy to switch content in a single page. Hope it helps!
I've been designing a pretty complicated avionics application. The thing is, it has many menu buttons to be clicked (12 to be exact) and each one of them perform a different action. For instance, one could be a login panel and the other one a PDF reader. How could I organize this programmatically?
Currently, I've been setting each item in a panel and setting it to visible or invisible, according to the active or clicked item.
How would you guys do this?
Thanks in advance!
You might consider a FlowLayoutPanel, although I'm not sure how flexible it would be in meeting your requirements. If you set your panels up with docking properties, you should be able to manage.
I would also recommend using a UserControl to separate code and functionality. If panels need to communicate, implement the observer/observable pattern instead of subscribing to events between user controls.
Like IAbstract says, you should consider separating the different UI elements as UserControls. You can then do things like use a factory to construct them and add them to your window as required.
I've found this sort of approach, used with a Model-View-Presenter type pattern, works really well for WinForms apps with dynamic user interfaces.