I feel quite limited by the default ContextMenuStrip, as it only can contain buttons, and no Controls.
I was wondering that for a long time, and I already tried it, using forms, but it never really worked out.
I already have I idea on how to set the whole thing up, with events and items. The only problem I have is the paint method.
When you open a ContextMenu (ContextMenuStrip) you can set its position on the mouse cursor, and it will be there, even if that means that it goes beyond the active form. (So I can't use the Controls Class as inheritance, as they can only draw themself as a part of a form.
Now I thought to use the Form Class as a base for my ContextMenu, but those where placed on the screen randomly.
So what I actually need is a class (or something similar) that can draw itself, without problems, and can be placed accurately on the screen.
Any hint would be nice, thanks.
Greg the Mad
Your first statement is false -- you can have a TextBox or a ComboBox in a ContextMenuStrip.
MSDN ToolStripComboBox
MSDN ToolStripTextBox
From the designer there is a small drop-down arrow when your mouse is in the "Type Here" box (sometimes hard to click) that will allow you to change the type.
If you are looking to allow for any type of control to be displayed in a top down fashion inside of a container to be positionable... you could always make a custom control using FlowLayoutPanel. With it's properties FlowDirection=TopDown and WrapContents=False to keep a vertical approach. This will handle your "menu" basics and your new control can expose whichever events you wish from each Control. You will have to handle the logic of showing the panel and positioning with it's Location property as well.
I forgot to address the issue with drawing outside of the parent form. Notice that ContextMenus are smart and when they reach a boundary of their parent they draw away from it. You should logically be able to draw in the correct direction (Up/Down or Left/Right) from any right mouse click. Per your attempt with a Form, set StartPosition=Manual then prior to calling Show() or ShowDialog() set it's Location property respective to the X and Y parameters provided in the event args of MouseClick.
Related
For a fast summary of the problem look at the picture at the bottom.
Hello,
I created a Form (named BaseForm) that serves as base for all my windows.
This base-Form contains (for the sake of simplicity) something like a "statusbar" (a usercontrol) at the bottom.
That statusbar is Locked so it can't be moved or resized in the designer.
It also has the it's anchor set to left,bottom,right so it always stays at the bottom and resizes horizontally.
Now when make another Form and change so it inherits MyProject.BaseForm instead of System.Windows.Forms.Form, the statusbar is there.
But now there is a problem with the statusbars position and size.
The statusbars standard location and size is wrong. VisualStudio takes the location and size from the BaseForm instead of applying the Anchor.
Also I can't (and don't want to!) move/resize the statusbar to fix the problem.
One obvious and working solution would be setting the statusbars Dock property to Bottom.
But I can't use that as a generic solution to my problem because I also have controls that should not be docked. (For example a button that should always stay at the bottom-right corner of the form)
You have a simple problem, the control is private so can't be messed with in the derived form. None of its properties are accessible, including Location and Size. Which freezes it solid in the wrong spot on your derived form. The layout engine can't move it either. And why it displays the lock icon.
Go back to the BaseForm, select the user control and change the Modifiers property from Private to Protected. Rebuild. Now you can move it on the derived form where it needs to go.
I think the best way to approach this is to use a TableLayoutPanel instead of explicit docking. Create a 2 row TableLayoutPanel in the parent form. Make the bottom row AutoSize and put the status bar into that. This way the derived forms are free to add content in the other row which represents the remainder of the control.
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'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.
At this point, I almost never want to design a control with rich design-time support again. That said...
I am already overriding the SnapLines property in my ControlDesigner-derived class to manually forward out various snaplines from the child controls of my control -- the text baseline (pink) snap from the labels and comboboxes; the text inset snap from the labels; the top, bottom, left and right snaplines from the comboboxes. Those snaplines activate when the control itself is moved around on the form and when other controls are moved around it.
What I need is the ability to tell the designer to activate the snaplines and then deactivate them while I'm doing an internal move or resize of the underlying controls.
My comboboxes are resizable through overrides of OnMouseDragBegin, OnMouseDragMove, and OnMouseDragEnd in my control designer. The magic bullet I'm looking for is something I can call in Begin to tell the designer to show the snaplines and something in End to tell it to stop.
Allowing people to resize and move the internal controls at design time is kind of useless if they don't show snaplines for each other or for external controls.
As with stuff like this, it's incredibly hard to search for. I've found one post on a forum where someone asked this exact question that had (of course) no responses. That's about it.
Obviously the issue of actually snapping to the snaplines when/if they're shown remains. Just being able to see them would be a nice start.
Any ideas?
The best way to do what you want todo is to create a Design Surface MSDN Reference
I've used this to create my own design surface for my application so that the clients can customize the forms.
Hope this helps,
Johan J v Rensburg
I need to create a form with two panels:
1. Destination
2. Source
On the source panel there will be picture boxes. I need to be able to move it from source to point at destination panel with mouse.
I have a problem connected with different coordinates of the panels.
Please, help with advice or an idea what to do.
Moving those controls requires changing their Parent property. That's not easy to do, there is no good time to do this while the user is dragging with the mouse. You'll also get the effect of the panel clipping the control, you cannot display it on both with half of the control on one and the other half on the other panel. And yes, you have to change the Location property of the control when you change the parent or it will jump.
Punt the problem, don't use two panels. It only has to look like a panel, easily done by drawing one in the form's Paint method (or OnPaint override, better). Use e.Graphics.DrawRectangle or FillRectangle.