currently I am using a tool tip to display information when it hovers over a region on a winform. This works well and I don't have any complaints, but the boss want's to display more complex data, that would best be displayed in a grid rather than text.
Is there a way that perhaps I could embed a usercontrol or a datagridview in a tool tip.
thanks
C#, .Net 2.0, windows.Forms
There's such a thing as an owner-drawn tooltip. You'd have to handle the painting of the grid yourself. You wouldn't get any interactivity, although a tooltip that lets you click and scroll sounds odd anyway.
If your boss is willing to spend money on this then I can happily recommend the DevExpress tooltip control, for its customisability.
You can write a custom control (shouldn't be too hard, just a yellow rectangle with a drop shadow) with a data grid on it. It just needs to fade out when the mouse moves away and get displayed after the mouse rests on it for a couple of seconds.
Related
I have created a custom control of my own and i am in a need of making this custom control as a ToolTip for the Labels or Buttons.
But i could not find a way to set the Custom control as ToolTip.
Anyone please help me on setting the Custom control as ToolTip.
Note:
I don't need solution with showing the Custom Control in mouse_hover events of controls.
Please suggest me ideas to make the custom control as default ToolTip in standard way.
Regards,
Amal Raj
I assume that you already know about overriding the paint event, so I won't go into that. If you want anything a bit more complicated, deriving from the ToolTip control to extend it for your purposes won't make much sense since you'll run into restrictions quite fast.
What you should do is implement your own ToolTip control by reusing some important bits from the original one. If you're feeling adventurous you could follow these steps to get started. I'm going to refer to your custom control as tooltip from now on:
If you want to show custom text or something else for each control that uses your tooltip, you need to implement IExtenderProvider in your class. Here's more about it.
You need to keep track of controls that are using your tooltip and the custom values you've set for them. Internally, Windows Forms tooltip uses a HashTable for that purpose. Key is the control showing your tooltip and value is the tooltip text (or something else you want to tie to your tooltip).
If you want to have more than just one string to show (title, description, image etc), you can have multiple HashTables.
When adding the tooltip to a control, subscribe to mouse events (enter, move, leave) to keep track of when to show the tooltip. If you want to have a delay before showing the control, you need to use an internal timer to keep track of time.
You'll most likely want the tooltip to extend outside the main form's boundaries. You could wrap your tooltip inside a headerless form or an alpha blended form to allow other shapes than rectangle.
Those are the very generalized first steps. In reality, there's quite a bit more to be done. It's been a few years since I implemented my custom ToolTip control so I might be forgetting something crucial. However, if you spend some time poking around the code of Windows Forms's ToolTip class, you'll get quite a good idea of what's going on behind the curtains.
I haven't reviewed the code myself but judging from the ratings, this article will give you a good starting point too: A ToolTip with Title, Multiline Contents, and Image. It's in VB.NET but you can easily convert it to C# by using Telerik's converter or any other.
I want to develop a file viewing program for a specific read-only file format and for the most part it will just be scrollable text. The ultra-simple way is of course to use an existing text display controls, but I've come to the conclusion that I want a graphical sort of "custom colored highlighting", text coloring, and maybe other things painted in. So I was planning to handle the painting myself. I take it that attempting to line up my own graphics on top of a label or rich text box would be a bad idea, so I was planning to just paint everything except the scroll bar... unless these labels/rich text controls are a lot more extensible in some way that I don't know about?
Assuming I go the painting route, I'm not 100% sure of the specifics. Do I paint directly into a Panel? Or is there a better GUI control to paint into? Also, I think it will be better if I don't buffer the screen because I think repainting the contents on validation will be easy/efficient... but repainting from a buffer might be even faster... will it save me a lot of trouble if I just have a screen buffer... is this significantly inefficient? Is my plan of painting directly into a Panel, unbuffered, a good idea or is there a preferred method that I'm passing up?
Try to use WebBrowser control orRichTextBox (make formatted html or rtf from your text).
Hello,
Above is the program I am writing. On the right panel is basically two custom controls (the blue rectangle area) I created and just added them as controls to the background panel control when this winform program loads.
I used MS paint to draw out the pop up balloon that I want to see when my mouse enter this control's area. I want to do the following:
1. If mouse enter the control area, the yellow area balloon pop up and populate with the information of that specific control
2. If mouse move out of the control area, the pop up balloon disappear.
Can this be done with Winform application? I looked around and found out about Tooltip class but so far from researching I don't know if it does what I want to do.
I could be wrong but googling around gave me the impress that Tooltip offers very little in term of style. Ideally I want to make this pop up balloon into almost like a border-less pop up window where I can put image , font ect.....at will. Also Tooltip works if you hover over a button or specific field whereas I want the entire control area.
Can this be done? I appreciate if you can point me to any work around if there is one.
I wrote a comment, but I figure I'll expand it into a full answer. This is assuming you want a new control, which isn't a tooltip, for maximum customizability. I did something similar to this for work recently, to act as a non-modal info popup that disappears when clicked.
Creating a Custom Popup Form
What you want is essentially a floating popup that appears over your form, which means you'll want to define a new Form object, rather than a UserControl, as it won't actually be embedded within your other form.
Give it a multiline, non-editable textbox that you can fill with the information you want to populate, then simply call a new instance of the form on your Mouse_Enter event. Close it upon Mouse_Leave.
Adjusting The Style
You'll have to play with it a bit to get it to actually act like a popup and not just a window. I'd recommend setting it to a non-modal popup, and removing the border. You can write a function to automatically size it to its contents. I don't imagine you'll want the user manually resizing it.
Some other things to look into would be overriding the CreateParams property that comes with the basic Form object. You can force DropShadows and TopMost forms without making the form modal. Overriding ShowWithoutActivation to always return true will prevent the form from stealing focus when it pops up.
I'm not sure if you can pull off rounded edges like you have in your mockup. Perhaps you can pull it off with some wizardry in the OnPaint() function, but I couldn't tell you how to do it.
It might be a bit of a pain for fiddling around with, but you can get some good functionality and appearance out of it. If you think you can pull it off acceptably with the ToolTip class, go for it. It took me about a week to get my notifications where I wanted them (though I added several features that you probably don't need to worry about).
Examples
Some keywords to look up in related searches would be Toast Notification and Non-Modal Popup. This might be some use:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/442983/Android-Style-Toast-Notification-for-NET
Since you already have implemented custom user controls you might want to try it again. Make a control that is that style and color, changes it's size based on it's text. You can feed it information (such as the text to display) from your existing user control object. You can also have the mouse enter/leave code reside in your first user control.
If you're not sure how to make a rectangle with round corners you can either make it on the fly using a graphics object (which will turn into a bitmap on the screen) or make it how you want it to look in GIMP (or photoshop if you have it) then use that image as the background on your user control. Make the default background transparent (so your voids above the round corners are not grey). If you make a pre loaded image you'll need to be aware you will only be able to scale it equally in Y and X directions. unequal scaling will make it look distorted.
Can you use the Mouse_Enter event on the control?
I created a custom control that looks a lot like the tab buttons in VS 2012. In my control I could set a propertiy to posistion the text and sidebar vertical or horizontal. After playing around with the control I figured there was probably a better way to go about this. So i fired up the Expression Blend preview and suprising enough (only second or third time using blend) was able to create a style to achieve a simliar style button. However, Now I want to have control over the text and sidebar being vertical or horizontal. I would also like to have control over the mouse over color. Is this possible to do via one style or am i going to have to create a bunch of different styles?
If I understood correctly you can achieve what you want to do with event triggers.
I am in need of a class that mimics a TextBox control but is not a Control, but instead a custom drawn component or element.
Creating one feels like re-inventing the wheel since I see them everywhere. For example, in any modern web browser the text boxes are not controls. Most Winforms controls, especially ToolStrip controls such as ToolStripTextBox, have elements which behave like text boxes (but are not Controls).
I assume that Microsoft doesn't reinvent the wheel for each control they make it. But most likely their code is proprietary and not public.
Does any one know of an open source solution for this? I am experienced with GDI+ drawing but a text field is not a trivial task when you consider caret positioning, selection, and inserting text.
Any pointers on how to go about writing the code myself would be appreciated, such as how to calculate the character at a given point. Should I create a lookup table for the measured width of each possible character? Or loop through MeasureString to take into account formatting space?
You may find the code you need inside this article/project. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/161871/Fast-Colored-TextBox-for-syntax-highlighting
Why must it not be a Control? If you're using Windows Forms, it is far more likely that you really want a control.
Common cases where this type of question might come up are Grid editing. Instead of a non-control TextBox, what normally happens is that the grid displays simple text in the grid until the user focuses on that grid. At that point a temporary, real TextBox is inserted for editing. Leaving that cell throws the TextBox away and the possibly-changed text is now displayed by the Grid.
I assume your situation is similar. If not, please explain your goals.