I have asked the question "Is there something like master page in desktop applications?" Now I am in position that I have to extend the question. Thanks for understanding.
I have add one MDI master form into my project and several inherited forms that inherit MDI master one. I was using this code.
private void searchToolStripMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
foreach (Form child in this.MdiChildren)
{
child.Close();
}
Search childSearchForm = new Search();
childSearchForm.MdiParent = this;
childSearchForm.Text = "Search ";
childSearchForm.Show();
}
This code is triggered when I press some button on master form and the new in this case Search form is opened inside master.
Now my question is the right way to build desktop applications or there is some other more elegant way where content of user interface can be dynamic and switch from view to view by clicking on the buttons inside. For instance clicking on "Search" button on some search form will take you to search results grid, all that happening in one master form.
And if this is right way (which I doubt) how can I achieve to open other inside forms by clicking on buttons inside them. Also if I put some controls on masterpage they will appear two times in master form and in inherited form.
Thanks.
PS
I am using Visual Studio 2008 and MS SQL 2005.
If you are only wanting to show one view at a time you could create a new user control for each view you require. e.g One for your search results.
Then you could add a panel and clear the controls contained within the panel and add the new one to display the view you are after.
Or as described, the other option is to use a tab control, hide the tabs and set the visible index programatically.
Not sure how you would easily do this in winforms, but in WPF you could create a navigation app - a link driven navigation similar to a web browser experience but still a stand alone application. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/rampup/cc514215.aspx for details of how to get started.
Related
I am using windows form to build an app that draws the form controls based on the connected device dynamically. So I have a tab control and when the user select tab3 for instance the tab page content will be drawing based on connected device for example add two text boxes and a button. How can I do this. I would like also to know how to position those controls after they are created.
private void tabPage3_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
TextBox text = new TextBox();
this.tabPage3.Controls.Add(text);
}
As you just stated, you create your Controls like in your example. Positioning is achieved by the Left and Top Properties of your freshly created control. BUT, my advise is, it will be easier to use predefined UserControls and add them dynamically, because I think you don't have nearly unlimited types of devices.
If you are curious how Visual Studio Designer is creating those code, just look up Designer.cs in InitializeComponent()
I'm trying to make a WindowsFormApplication in Visual Studio 2015 and need some help.
I've been trying to search for the answer on internet but can find out how to do the following:
I have two windows (solutions?). I open the second window with a button in the first one with this code:
this.Hide();
intermec prodinter = new intermec();
prodinter.ShowDialog();
My question is:
How can i "include" the second window (like "include" in PHP) instead of close the first window and then open the next one, like it does now?
A Form is just another Control. Think of it as a Container (because it holds other Controls).
A User Control can also hold more than one Control. There are ways you can display a Window inside another Window in a WinForms app, but the desired effect is not always guaranteed. So it would be best to place all of your controls (for "page 1", for example) in a User Control called "Page1", and then, when appropriate, add that User Control to the Form, and set its Dock property to Fill.
And when it's time to show a different "page", Hide(); "Page1", and Show(); "Page2".
I think you are talking about form inheritance:
Just create a form, lets call it as frmBase. And add some controls onto frmBase which you want to have on other forms as well.
Create other form, lets call it as frmDerived.
In the code behind of frmDerived, just do the following:
// derive the frmDerived form from frmBase
public partial class frmDerived : frmBase
{
public frmDerived()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
}
And then just check the frmDerived form design, it should include everything from frmBase.
And you may want to make the access modifier of some controls of frmBase to Public as required to access them on frmDerived.
I hope this will help you. :)
I'm currently working on a "Settings" screen for a project and want to implement a view similar to that found in Visual Studio, where there is a TreeView with a list of options and clicking on one of these options will load a UserControl in an adjacent panel in the same form. I am using a SplitContainer to group these two controls.
I thought that the Load event for the User Control would be triggered when it was displayed in the panel, but this is not the case. I also tried to trigger the Enter event but it still did not work so I tried to call a function when the form was initialized using the following method.
ViewSecurity newViewSecurity = new ViewSecurity(Globals._connectionString);
// This creates a new instance of the ViewSecurity form from within the TreeView.
And this is the code in the initializing function for the User Control
public ViewSecurity(string _cString)
{
InitializeComponent();
connectionString = _cString;
MessageBox.Show("Test");
populateData();
}
This method does not work either - the MessageBox does not show up and the function populateData() isn't called either. Any advice on how I could achieve what I am trying to do?
Thanks in advance!
My goal
I am working on a project in C# using Visual Studio 2013. The project is one that I intend to contain a lot of pages. These pages are all linked together using buttons. My problem is that I cannot come up with an efficient and elegant solution for this.
My attempts
So far I have came up with two potenial solutions to my problem. First I added extra forms and then on button press I hid the current form and displayed the new form, like so:
Form2 frm = new Form2();
frm.Show();`
Form1.Hide();
While this does work, I have two problems with it.
My project will end up with hundreds of forms
The transition between forms looks sloppy. I am aiming for a browser like transition by where all navigation occurs on one window, without opening and closing others.
The second potential solution I tried incorporated the use of Panels. So I essentially created each page on a different Panel. Then the appropriate panel was shown upon a button press and the rest were hidden. Like this:
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
mainMenuPanel.Hide();
submenuPanel1.Show();
submenuPanel2.Hide();
submenuPanel3.Hide();
submenuPanel4.Hide();
}
This is exactly what I was looking for however my issue with it is that managing the vast amount of panels quickly became a nightmare. Editing the controls on a Panel that was hidden behind 9 other Panels and as the number of panels in my project was only going to grow - this does not seem like the ideal solution in its current form.
In my head I thought there maybe an option in Visual Studio 2013 that allows me to 'hide' the Panels I am not using on the form, or drag them off the form temporarily. Is that an option in Visual Studio.
If not do any of you know a more efficient and manageable way of achieving this?
Thanks in advance.
If you are stuck using WinForms, your best bet is probably using UserControls. you can actually extend the UserControl class out to be a "page" ie: UserControlPage. This makes the form much simpler in function, but you will need to do some finicky work with handling events /passing data if the controls need to talk to each other.
if you aren't nailed into using Winforms, WPF supports all of this natively, and has wonderful tools for building all the pages you would need, and storing/populating your data, and propagating events.
If you want to have single form with changing content, and you don't want to mess up with panels in one form, then solution is user controls. You will be able to create them dynamically and add to form controls. Also there is no mess, because your form will be very simple - you can have single 'placeholder' control which will be used to dock user control which is currently displayed (e.g. panel control):
private void ShowContent(Control content)
{
placeHolderPanel.Controls.Clear(); // clear current content
placeHolderPanel.Controls.Add(content); // add new
content.Dock = DockStyle.Fill; // fill placeholder area
}
Usage:
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
ShowContent(new FooUserControl());
}
You could subclass the Panel class and create as many of those custom panels as needed, then they would be inserted on your Main Form, and managed as you described.
The advantage is that you would be able to individually edit them as a separate user control.
The drawback is that you lose direct event handling of controls on those panels from the main form. You can still define your own events on those panels and delegate the individual control events.
There's always a trade-off somewhere.
Cheers
good sirs!
I've been messing around with the next scenario:
First, I have a webform structured as a WebForm containing a DevExpress ASPXPopUpControl and some other controls. Inside the PopUpControl there is a UserControl (lets call it ucA) containing some other controls and a UserControl (called ucB) that contains a cursed ASPxHtmlEditor (added because it's a new requirement).
When the user hits a button on main webform I show the PopUp (originally was a jQuery dialog but since HTMLEditor messes up with jQuery I've been forced to break the standard and use the popup) which contains the ucA. The user fills some fields in ucA and hit the save button. After user hits, I save some dataz and at this point I need to recover a textbox value placed in the webform.
I'm using Parent.FindControl["myTextBox"] but it considers the popupcontrol as parent. When I was using jQuery (before implementing the editor) it worked like a charm.
I feel it's something trivial but thrust me when I say that this stole many hours of research.
Thanks in advance.
EDIT I forgot to mention that I want to look for another UserControl at main webform. This uc its used to display core messages to the user so when he hits the save button, save happens, popup is closed and i look (Parent.FindControl("myUCMessageBoard")) from the ucA for the usercontrol to display a "Transaction complete" message.
I'm thinking you're going to have to do something a little hacky, by using ViewState. If I understand correctly, you are trying to get access to a TextBox's Text on the Web Form, from a UserControl nested within a PopupControl (so you can't traverse all the way up to Web Form Level).
So, what I'd do at some point in the process is store the text in a ViewState variable that you can access from the User Control. It's not optimal, but since you're already hacking to get it to work, what's a little more hacking?
You should expose all controls from ucA as properties, then look for the control inside the DevxPopup the same way you doing. Given that all the controls that you need at the ucA has properties to access them, you could do all the logic you need!
Example:
public ucA : UserControl
{
public string myTextBoxText
{
get
{
return ((TextBox)Controls.FindControl("myTextBox")).Text;
}
}
/*And lot of controls*/
}
Then you looking for the popup at the Form
var ucA = (UcA)Form.Controls.FindControl("myPopup").Controls.FindControl("myucA");
ucA.myTextBoxText = /*Do stuff here with the text*/
Hopes this help you!