I'm adding some textboxes to a form dynamically at runtime. Everything works fine i.e. the textboxes are aligned, anchored and automatically resizes until the form is maximized. On maximizing the form, the textboxes are added to the same location while the form was not maximized. This causes a misalignment of the textboxes.
How can I ensure that all the textboxes are at the same location and of the same size both while the windowstate is normal as well as maximized?
EDIT:
Btw I'm using C#
EDIT:
Would a flowlayoutpanel be useful here?
It's a quite old question, but maybe i'm able to answer it.
After reading all your comments, i think i can summarize your problem to this:
You have a form at a specific size and add some controls at runtime at a specific location with anchor set to Top | Right.
If you just display the form and let the controls appear everything works fine
If you maximize your form (or change the size of it) your controls won't be appear anymore at the correct location you want.
To get rid of this problem you can try some different approaches:
Use a FlowLayoutPanel, take care for the FlowDirection and maybe just create all your needed controls beforehand and just toggle the visible state.
Use correct values for the location of your newly created controls.
The second point is the error you have (i think). You found someway to calculate the location of your control if your form has it's original size. To get the correct position if the size of the form has changed (e.g. maximized) you have to consider several factors.
The delta values from your default size to your current size.
The Anchor(s) you wish to set on your control.
In your case you'd like to put a control which is anchored Top | Right, but the location is set by Top | Left. In that case you have to calculate the difference between the control.location.x and the form.width in it's default size. Then you take this difference and subtract it from the form current width. Now you can place your control at this position (cause Top never changes through a resizing). If you have a Anchor at Bottom | Right you have to calculate the same with control.location.y and form.height.
The behaviour and calculation if no anchor, for Top | Bottom or Left | Right are set is left as an exercise to the reader. ;-)
Last but not least there is also another hacky way to get your control at the right position:
If you like to place a new control somewhere change the Form.Visible to false
Save the form state, size and location
Change them to your default values
Add the controls you want
Restore the formerly saved values
Make the form visible again.
The Anchor property specifies which borders the controls should ensure they're always the same distance from. It can get pretty confusing, which is why you're seeing things shift around when anchored to the right border.
If you just want to ensure that the textbox display stays consistent relative to itself, I'd suggest putting down a Panel, with anchoring on the Panel, and then adding textboxes to the Panel. The X and Y coordinates on your text boxes become relative to the Panel, so it's a lot easier to do layout especially when the location of the Panel suddenly changes.
Related
I have a Winform I want to resize. Not after launching; I want to resize it in the designer by dragging the edges.
I am aware that I can change the size manually in the form properties. This is not what I want to do. I want to quickly size the default size of the form with my mouse.
The problem appears to be that I cannot grab the edges of the form for some reason. I repeat, this is NOT DURING RUNTIME. It is not that I have disabled/enabled Autosize/Resizing.
It's almost like the edge grabs are a single pixel wide and I just can't hit it. I don't know. I've looked for accessibility settings. The last thing I want to do is reinstall MSVS. It's just maddening.
I've attached a photo. The little boxes on the bottom, right, and bottom-right corner are my targets.
you can try to click the form title before resizing. I think you may have a panel (or any container control) which is full docked in the form, that's why when you click the form body, you selected the panel instead of the form.
Another issue that I encountered was the windows font size was set to 120% (or more), so go to windows display setting and set the font size to 100%.
How to run or adjust Windows application efficiently in any screen resolution in C# 4.0?
I have done it in 1600 x 1200 resolution but if I try in lower resolutions only some part of the forms are visible.
How to solve this problem? I have searched a lot and got to know about Anchor & Dock will be useful but also to came to know that these should be used from the beginning of designing but I have completed my application while this resolution is now causing the problem when I install the application in any system
The quick and dirty method of making sure your controls remain visible would be to place a Panel on the form, set Dock = Fill and AutoScroll = True, then place every other control in your form inside it. Your controls won't get cut off, but your program won't win any awards for asthetics. If the program is brand new, that's really not the way you want to start things off.
You could redesign it to make use of Anchors and Docking, as you mentioned. You could also place items such as a row of Button controls or a series of TextBox controls in a FlowLayoutPanel, which will take care of repositioning them as you resize the form.
But if adjusting for screen resolutions is important to you, a better way would have been to use WPF from the start. Controls are automatically resized and repositioned as needed, based on their container control.
The real question should be:
How do I want the controls to resize themselves with their parent?
The answer is that you need to specify anchors. Anchors are used to tell your controls how they should react on resize, and what the concerns should be.
Lets say you have a form with two [Cancel] and [OK] buttons. They are usually seen fit at the bottom right of your window. But the default Anchor property is set to Top, Left, so on your form's resize, they stick to the Top, Left corner where they belong according to the default settings. This won't be any trouble if your maximize your form, thus you'll have your button probably in the middle of the screen. But at least, you will see every controls adequately.
But what if resize your form smaller and smaller? Do you still want them to stick at the Top, Left, or Bottom, Right would be more useful? My guess is that you should set the Anchor property to Bottom, Right, for those two.
This might come in handy to have different Anchor property settings depending on how you want your control to react to your form resize. Let's take three TextBox controls aligned horizontally with each other. Perhaps your longer field will be your object Description property located on horizontal-center of your form. Then, when you risize, you have to think what would make more sense on resize. If it is to make it longer on resize in order to fill your form width with all your control, then perhaps you want the DescriptionTextBox to get wider and wider, and the contraray should also be true, on form's resize, you probably want this field to be resized smaller too. Then, to make this happen, you have to set the Anchor property to Left, Right, so that the edge of your DescriptionTextBox control remains at the same very distance of your form's edge at any time.
Another thing is of concern in case of resizing to smaller window, is its MinimumSize property. One shall agree that there is use to have a form of size 34x34 pixels. So, setting your MinimumSize property to a certain size which makes sens for the form to exist, you will avoid display glitches of controls getting one over another.
For more details on the Anchor property: Control.Anchor Property
For more details on the MinimumSize property: Control.MinimumSize Property
How can I keep the objects of my window (buttons, labels, etc) in center when the window is resized?
Currently, I have 3 buttons in a Windows Form. When I maximize the window, the buttons stay at the top left section of the window. I want them to be in the center as they were when the window was not maximized.
Any help?
You should set the Anchor properties of the object to none,
This will keep it in the middle.
Set the Anchor property of your controls correctly. By default your control is anchored to Top,Left. If you clear this property (anchor to nothing, essentially), your button will remain centered.
(It may seem like you want to anchor to all four sides, but in reality what this will do is resize your button to fill the form!)
To keep your layout fixed and in the middle do this:
On your Form add TableLayoutPanel.
Set it's Dock property to Fill.
Create 3 rows and 3 columns.
Edit rows and columns - set 50% for first and last column and row.
Set fixed size for middle row and column.
Place Panel or anything else you like in 2nd row and 2nd column. It will always be in the middle.
If you are using the visual designer of Visual Studio (And you have no reason not to), the property of your control you seek to manage how they are placed inside a form is "Anchor".
By default, when you create a new control, it is set to "Top-Left", which mean they would stay in a fixed position to the top left of your form. You can change that to anchor them to anything.
You can also disable the anchors and control their position by overriding the Resize method of the form.
I have simple WinForms GUI that I want to use with TabPages. The problem I'm having is resizing and working with multiple sizes of screens. What settings do I change for each TextBox, GroupBox to make it fit the screen nicely without making it feel to the user like it's badly designed?
Usually I would use Dock Fill but it doesn't work with more then 1 GroupBox. Then I checked/played with Anchor trying to make it bind to Top, Left, Right, Bottom for everything but that makes a big mess (textboxes overlapping other label, texboxes etc.). I tried to choose some here, some here but whenever I try resize unexpected things happen. How would I go from here? My system is 24" and resolution 1920x1080p, but my users often have a range from 1024x768 to 1920x1080.
Right now I'm using Devexpress controls but the question applies to both Devexpress and builtin controls.
First, set the form size in the designer to a bit less than the minimum expected resolution - say 900x650 or so. Then you can design a form that will work at all resolutions even if it doesn't get resized.
Next, work out which controls should stay a fixed size, and which should stretch/grow as the form us made bigger. Firstly, some fields won't benefit from being enlarged (e.g if you have a text box that always contains a percentage of up to 3 digits, it is pointless or even counter-productive to allow it to grow big enough to show 9 digits. Secondly, some fields fill the entire width of the form, so they naturally will work better if they grow with it.
Now, set the anchoring. In general, anchor the edge of a control to the nearest edge of the form. If you set only one anchor, the control will not stretch, and the anchored edge will start the same distance from that side of the form.
If you want a control to stretch, anchor opposing sides (eg left and right). This will keep those edges the same distance from the form's edges, so the control will stretch to fit.
You will see that if one control is anchored in place, and the control next to it is set to stretch, there is a good chance that they'll end up overlapping, so you must treat all controls across the form as a related group.
For more control, place groups of controls into a container control like a panel or group box. Then their anchoring relates to their parent group, and the group can be anchored to the form.
To see the effects, just resize the form in the designer and see where everything goes - then undo and fix any anchoring that didn't work. You'll soon get a feel for how the layout works, and how to design forms to work well with resizing.
I'm developing an app for Windows Mobile 5.0 and above, with C# and .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP2.
I have a WinForm with two panels inside (upperPanel and bottomPanel). I want that upperPanel always fill 2/3 of form's height, and bottomPanel fills 1/3 of form's height. Both panels will fill completly form's width.
I've used this:
upperPanel.Dock = Fill;
bottomPanel.Dock = Bottom;
But upperPanel fills the form completly.
How can I do this? I want, more o less, the same gui on differents form factors and on landscape or protrait mode.
Thank you.
What you need to do is to put the bottom panel on first and set its Dock property to Bottom. Then set the panel's height to be 1/3 of the form's height. Finally, add a second panel and set its Dock property to Fill. The key here is that you want to add the control that will fill the remaining area to be added last. Alternatively, you can play around with the Bring to Front and Send to Back commands in Visual Studio to get the designer to cooperate.
You may also need to hook the OnSizeChanged event for the form and re-set the height of the bottom panel to account for layout changes. It's been a little while since I did compact framework programming, so I'm not sure.
Right click on the upperPanel and select Bring To Front. However, I don't think this will give you the result you want. When you resize, the bottom panel will remain the same height, while the upper panel will stretch to fill the form.
Using your docking settings, with this code might do the trick:
protected override void OnSizeChanged(EventArgs e)
{
base.OnSizeChanged(e);
this.bottomPanel.Height = Convert.ToInt32((double)this.Height / 3.0);
}
Set both panels to "not anchored". That is: Remove Dock-Value and clear the Anchor property. Then, move the controls so they are sized the way you'd like them to be sized.
After that, upon resizing the form, they should resize relatively.
EDIT
Oops, just tried it and sure it doesn't work. I mixed this up with a solution that automatically keeps controls centered within the window...
Well, I'd guess you then have to create a handler for the form's Resize event and manually align the controls after the form has been resized.
Go to Tools, Other Windows, Document Outline. Find the two panels, and swap the order of them. The control that has DockStyle.Fill has to come first for it to be docked correctly. (or last.. never sure which one it is, but it is one of them :p)
This won't solve the always 1/3 and 2/3 issue though... cause the bottom panel will have a fixed height (unless I am mistaken). I think maybe the TableLayoutPanel supports this though...
Update: As noted in the comments, that panel doesn't exist in the compact framework. So, I suppose the easiest solution to this problem would then try to use the docking, but update the height of the bottom panel whenever the size of the form changes.
If you want this to work perfectly you'll need to add some code to the Resize event of the Form which then specifically works out the relative sizes and places the controls in the correct place after a resize.
If you're not worried about losing precision and the forms aren't going to move much you can avoid this by using some relatively smart anchoring. Essentially you're going to have to select a "grower" (the part of the form that gets bigger, the bigger the form gets). In this scenario I would probably anchor the top part to Top | Left | Right and the bottom part to Top | Left | Right | Bottom. This would mean that the lower part of the form will get bigger if the form is expanded. In most cases this is acceptable. If it isn't use the Resize event and some code.
The easiest way to do this is to nest panels. Just set up panels for top bottom and fill. Then use panels within those panels to do the same. The only issues I've had therein are datagrid resizing, which is always a pain anyway. in that case, you have to use some code to resize the datagrid control on the form resize event.
I would like to add a point to #jasonh answer.
For the panel that occupies 2/3 of the form, you will have to set the AutoScroll property of the panel to true.
This will enable the panel to display scroll when the control size exceed the visibility to the user and also ensure the visibility of the smaller panel which is 1/3 of the forms height.
You can get the required design by using nested panels along with few setting with Anchoring and Docking Properties.Follow the following steps:
1) Add the Form and put a Panel1 on it. Set its Dock Property as 'Fill' and ResizeMode as 'Grow&Shrink'.
2) Add Second panel2 and set its Dock Property to 'Bottom', Set the Height and set the Anchor property to 'Top,Left'.
3)Add Third panel and set its Dock Property to 'None', Set the Height and set the Anchor property to 'Top,Bottom,Left,Right'.
Save and Compile. Now all the panels Would maintain their relative Positioning With resizing.