I recently started using C# and WPF for one of my projects.
Is there a quick way of getting an input from the user? I have not been able to find one for WPF projects.
I don't want have to create another window, add OK and Cancel buttons, and add event handlers for everything. I can do it, but I wanted to know a simpler way of doing it.
AFAIK, that was possible in win forms. You can get user input with just one single line of code. Can I do it in WPF as well?
If you add the Microsoft.VisualBasic dll to your application, you can use the InputBox method to get a single value from the user.
Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction.InputBox("Prompt here",
"Title here",
"Default data",
-1,-1);
(Put -1,-1 in for the XPos,YPos to get it centred on the screen)
If your talking about basic yes/no input then there is a wpf MessageBox that works in pretty much the same way as the winforms one - see System.Windows.MessageBox
Is that what you are thinking of?
Also, all winforms classes can still be used in WPF apps, you just need to add a reference to the appropriate assembly.
Related
I am currently working on a Windows Presentation Foundation app and I need to make use of Message boxes. I want to get few information from user inside Message Box popup.
But they appear always like this:
But I think the actual look of it should be like that:
Does anybody know, why this is, and how to solve it? I tried all everything listed
here
, but nothing worked.
I agree with Keithernet, build your own. Its more of an Input Dialog box. You may want to plan it to create a window, create it with ex: 4 parameters which you could override so you can apply them in the form including
The title,
The prompt you want the user to fill in
optional default button 1 text
optional default button 2 text.
have the input value stored into a public property in the window for the text to be bound to during entry.
If the user clicks the cancel button (or similar), clear the text entry and close the window. If ok button, just close the window.
Then, when you call it with a YourWindow.ShowDialog(), upon return, you can look at the public property for that input text value.
You could even do with a property / flag if the user cancelled directly or not. I have done similar in a couple of my WPF apps.
MessageBox is very limited. Based on your screenshot, you should just create your own child Window with your own XAML so you can get the user input.
You can find sample service implementations/NuGets for this on GitHub. Here is one I've created sometime ago: https://github.com/Dirkster99/MsgBox
Just create your own is an oversimplifying statement in my opinion because this is usually a dialog that you want to show in different parts of the application. Therefore, you have to settle for a software design pattern (I chose a service implementation as suggested here).
Likewise, there are other design decisions that should be taken. I have for instance made sure that the API has a compatible subset of Show API calls with the standard .Net MessageBox to make its application as flexible as possible. I also settled for light and dark themes hoping this will make its application easy in any other theme...
In my WPF-project im popping up an Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction.InputBox to get a filename from the user. If this filename is already in use im popping up a System.Windows.MessageBox to show the hint, that its already in use. After i hit OK on the MessageBox and it closed, i still see parts of the InputBox mixed up with some elements(a button) from my main programm.
Why does this happen?
Thanks in advance
You generally don't want to use any Windows.Forms based controls in a WPF application, it's just somehow against the point. You can easily create your own input box though, with the advantage of total control over behavior and style. This link stackoverflow describes your problem very nicely.
I'm trying to make an application that will test some features of an existing app and I wanted it not to be window-size dependent and not to require focusing the window or etc.
I've already figured out how to get window handles for different controls in the tested app so I can click buttons, enter text to textboxes etc. with Send/Post Message but still got a few unsolved problems.
The first is selecting an item from a pop-up menu that can be triggered by button click (TAdvGlowMenuButton class) or right click somewhere- I can't even see any messages related to it in Spy++ so I have no idea how to do it, is it possible to select an item by name? as I don't have it's id
The second thing is clicking next to something, for example 10 pixels to the right of a button.
I have the button handle so I can get it's size and it's parent but I still don't know how to get it's position inside the parent - any ideas?:)
And also a quick one but I don't believe it is possible - can I somehow get position of a label in the tested app? I can't even see it in Spy++ .
I hope you can help me to find it out ;)
Edit: I forgot about the most important thing:P , I'd like to achieve it with Send/Post Message if only it is possible.
My recommendation would be to abandon the message sending/posting model altogether and instead use UI Automation. Automated testing tools is exactly what the UI Automation APIs were designed for, and they are much more capable than SendMessage/PostMessage.
Yes, I realize that this is exactly the opposite of the answer you were looking for. But you will have no end of trouble getting messages to do what you want. A fair number of them rely on the application having the focus, and it is completely reasonable for your code to make this assumption when you receive e.g. a WM_KEYDOWN message. A testing tool should not flag that as a bug.
I notice you've tagged this question with the C# and .NET tags. In that case, you may be interested to learn that the UI Automation APIs have been wrapped in the .NET Framework.
I need to create a window similar to this:
a window similar to the types of dialog boxes that have been included with windows vista.
but I could not find exactly the same dialog boxes. very similar - it's Credential dialog and Input dialog. In the first case there are differences in the UI, in the second - the number of input fields and the absence of label. How can I make exactly the same window? Sorry for bad English.
You want to create a dialog exactly like the first dialog you've shown, the one used by FluffyApp?
You'll have to create it yourself, by hand. It's not a standard Windows dialog; it's a custom dialog resource provided by the FluffyApp application. It's obviously modeled to look a lot like the standard Windows authentication dialog, which is a good idea—users are already familiar with the native UI and will find your application to be much easier to use if it strongly resembles what they're already accustomed to. I recommend that if you decide to create your own custom dialog that you follow Windows's example as well.
But it's not entirely clear why you need your dialog to look exactly like the one that FluffyApp uses. I'm not really even sure why FluffyApp needed to create a custom dialog! It seems like the standard Windows authentication dialog would be perfectly sufficient. They have the same number of input fields, the UI designers at Microsoft have just replaced labels with cue banners. Not anything to worry about.
Those are standard windows dialogs, but instead of letting the dialog manager draw the text, they use DrawThemeText to draw the text, using one of the themed elements (not sure what, because you have several examples). You can play around with the various parameters to DrawThemeText to come up with something that works.
I've been struggling for a long time with basic controls that Windows Forms offers to developers, but... right now, I am developing an application that requires more advanced control than normal "TextBox".
Since, at this time, my application is about memory management, I have to show in the form, the process memory in bytes (or other type of data) to the user, giving it the ability to modify it as he wants.
The problem comes here, because... if I show the data in a TextBox, it only allow me to display the data in read-only text because if I let the user modify the textbox directly, it will be very messy and unaesthetic.
I was reviewing some projects on SourceForge about C# and the handling of hexadecimal data, and i found a good project, called Be.HexEditor, which has a control developed and designed by its creators, but in GDI+.
The control is called HexBox, and that's just what I need to get.
Do any of you know how to develop a control like this?... I would greatly facilitate things. What kind of manuals/books should I read to learn this kind of development? I ask this because I ignore everything about GDI+.
Or... is there other way for do it?
I would use a textbox to show to the user the current value and another textbox to enter the desired value (maybe a slider will work better).
I think you'll find it's GDI+ that you have to learn
http://www.amazon.co.uk/GDI-Programming-Creating-Controls-Programmer/dp/1861006314
You may still be able to write controls in WPF and then include them somehow into your winforms app, but if you need to push pixels GDI+ is the only way.