I've seen two threads here about TDI & C#. Both of them didn't really answer the questions I have ...
Since TDIs are pretty much like a standard nowadays, I can hardly imagine, that I have to buy a special control (like AvalonDock or SandDock).
This must be possible with built in the tab-control(?) somehow! I don't need special features like dock- and draggable tabitems. Just open every form in a new tab. Thats it.
Like putting every forms content controls into user controls and by request (button, menu click ...) add a new tab and put the corresponding user control on it ... something like this.
How would you do it? This can't be THAT complicated (even for me) or am I missing something?!
thanks a lot!
Maybe Josh Smith's article on MVVM can give you an idea how to design such user interface. Example being built there is kinda tabbed document interface so you can use it as a starting block.
It's not that hard. It seems hard because there are a lot of different ways to do it.
Try this:
<TabControl x:Name="documentArea"/>
Handler for AddForm button:
private void AddFormClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
object form = GetNewForm();
documentArea.Items.Add(form);
}
That's it. You have to implement GetNewForm() in one of two ways. Have it return a user control that displays the form.
OR better yet, have it return your document that you want to display. Use a DataTemplate to select the controls to use for displaying this document. This method is going to be more complex to set up.
Related
Pre-warning, I'm new to C# and XAML, but I'm really enjoying Windows 10 UWP apps. I've got a question on how to appropriately handle a SplitView.
I've got a Main Page, in which I have a SplitView control. In the SplitView Content, I've added a Frame for navigation to other pages. I want to add the Hamburger button on the child page to open the SplitView on the Main Page, but I can't access the SplitView control from the child page. How can I make the SplitView control accessible so that the hamburger button within the sub-page can open the SplitView pane?
The alternative is to add a header in the Main Page and have a static hamburger button there, but I don't like this option as it makes handling the text header content more difficult. Another is to copy the SplitView to each page. I don't want to do this either.
Any advice would be fantastic! Thank you.
I would highly recommend you take your alternative option of including the hamburger button in the main page. Users always expect it to be in the same location every time and changing this approach will probably result in a bad user experience.
You also don't want to be repeating code and thus you don't want to recreate the button on every page as well as any additional functionality like the open/close commands.
Rather than referencing elements from one page to another, a better practice is to keep things loosely coupled. This can be done with a messenger plugin which sends an event from one page to the other which can give it instructions on what you want to do. That way the other page only has to listen for the event instead of holding strong references. To streamline some of this process you could inherit from a base class which implements the messenger functionality.
That would provide a solution to your button and your header text situations but setting them up is out of the scope of this question. Depending on the size of you app and your goals, you might like to look into existing frameworks which helps in designing maintainable apps. A good Mvvm framework I would recommend checking out is MvvmCross which also cross platform and contains a messenger plugin.
Good luck with your app.
I found that solution :
In the MainPage, in your SplitView pane button method, add a SplitView reference as parameter in Navigate() :
private void SlitViewPaneButton_Tapped(object sender, TappedRoutedEventArgs e)
{
var frame = contentFrame;
Page page = frame?.Content as Page;
if (page?.GetType() != typeof(ChildPage))
{
frame.Navigate(typeof(ChildPage), SplitViewName);
}
}
In your ChildPage.xaml.cs :
protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e)
{
SplitView sv = new SplitView();
sv = e.Parameter as NavigateControls;
}
You can now do sv.IsPaneOpen = false, in your ChildFrame code.
Note : if you want to pass several Controls, create a Class with these Controls as variables, and use an instance as parameter.
As stated above, it is better to keep your hamburger button in your main page for a couple of reasons. One is the consistency mentioned above. Second, you would have to recreate the hamburger button in each of your content pages instead of just once in the MainPage.xaml. Additionally, keep in mind, there are different kinds of interactions with the SplitView menu in terms of how it pops in and out and how it is displayed, all listed below.
Inline – When the menu pane is opened, it pushes the content over. When it’s closed, the content goes back to its original location
Overlay – When the menu pane is opened, it lays on top of the content. When it’s closed, it is invisible.
Compact Overlay – When the menu pane is opened, it lays on top of the content. When it’s closed, the pane is still visible in Compact Mode.
Compact Inline – When the menu pane is opened, it pushes the content over. When it’s closed, the content goes back to its original position but the pane is still visible in Compact Mode.
You can also see a quick intro into the SplitView here.
http://jamesqquick.com/windows-10-splitview-intro/
I've searched but cannot find an answer to this question, and maybe that means there is a better way to do what I'm attempting.
In a WPF application, using MVVM design pattern: I've created a UserControl that is a box. This popup box has two options (buttons) on it, "Okay" and "Cancel". This user control has it's own view model to supply it's message data. Creating and showing this popup is simple enough. My trouble is I would like to wait for the users choice. Something similar to a DialogReponse? Ideally I would like to do something like this:
if (MyPopup.Show())
{
//do something
}
else
{
//do something else
}
Maybe there is a better approach to what I'm trying to do. I don't want to use a message box as I have the custom popup I've made. But maybe popup is the wrong control? Thanks ahead of time for any help.
If you want to have the functionality of a Window, why not use one?
new MyCustomDialogWindow().ShowDialog();
Use ShowDialog() method. For more information read MSDN
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
I want to fill an updatepanel with new dynamic controls in response to a button click.
However, I also want to be able to access the values of these dynamic controls in response to an event in one of the controls.
Specifically, I want the button to bring up two dropdownmenus. One of the menus (or both if need be) is in another update panel. I want the first menu in the update panel to change its data in response to a value getting selected in the other menu.
I think my problem is that when I cause a postback with one dropdownmenu I lose the other dropdownmenu because I created it in the button_click handler.
I know I should create dynamic controls in the Page_Init method (or so ive heard) but I only want the controls to show up if the button is clicked. There are other buttons on the page which need to create a different set of dynamic controls.
Thanks.
There are a lot of ways you can handle this, and which approach to take really depends on your project's requirements and your available resources.
The smoothest way to do it that would generally provide the best user experience would be to use a Javascript technique to hide and show controls as the page required them. JQuery is the library I would recommend for this. On the most basic level, you simply wire the control's activation (such as a button_click event) and hide or show a div containing the dynamic content as necessary, like so:
$("#control").show();
// and
$("#control").hide();
Alternatively, you can do this in C# by using the Visible property on many of the normal web controls for ASP.NET. The usual code-behind approach would look something like this:
private void btnControl_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
var dynamicControl1 = FindControl("dynamicControl1");
dynamicControl.Visible = false; // or true, as the case may be
}
This particular approach is mostly attached to code-behinds, though, which I would encourage you to avoid if possible. They are practically impossible to test and will make projects a pain to work in. You can use a similar approach in the MVC3 framework, of course, it will just be a little different how you send and receive the control you are setting to not be visible. The other benefit this has that is kind of nice is that if something is set to not be visible, it tends not to even be displayed in the HTML generated by the templating engine (YMMV depending on the engine, but I know this is true in Razor). So someone viewing the source of your webpage won't be able to see inactive controls, which may or may not be something that appeals to you.
EDIT: I see the problem is less to do with how to display these things, and more with how to create and read them back given on-the-fly input.
I'm sure there's a way to do this with Javascript (which would more than probably be the cleanest and best way to do this), but I'm not good enough with JS to know the answer to that one. The way you would handle this in ASP.NET is make the div you're going to add controls to server-side (by using runat='server', then add what you need there. Again, the trivial code-behind approach would be something like:
private void btnControl_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
foreach(var checkBoxChecked in chkBoxes.Where(x => x.Checked))
{
div.Controls.Add(new WebControl()) // or whatever the heck else it is you need.
}
}
This presumes that you have an IEnumerable<CheckBox> to iterate over, of course. You may also want an IList<WebControl> to keep track of all the junk you're adding. You will also need to make sure the CSS is applied properly to the div for the controls you're adding. And again, code-behinds are pretty awful and I use the example only because it'd be easy to spin up in a project to test for yourself.
I'm working on an application that presents the user with varied data, depending on the object being viewed. The objects are all of the same interface just with extended properties beyond once distinguished.
I'm looking for the "best" way to display a type-dependent control to the user. I would like to use tabs but I'm stuck with .NET 2.0 and from what I can gather the only way to hide/show tabs are to remove them and re-add them. That might be the best way but that leads to issues regarding blinking of the GUI components, keeping tabs on the active tab when reloading, etc.
I could make custom controls for each and either have them all loaded and hide/show when necessary (which I have done in the past on projects), or dispose and re-instantiate them...
To clarify best, I would say the closest balance between code elegance and program efficiency.
I have used and have had the best luck with loading them all and then showing/hiding the ones needed.
Disposing and re-instantiating everything always made things very messy.
In order to not have load time be horrible, you can instantiate them on first use. Something like:
IView LoadView(Type dependantType)
{
// get the view or create one
IView view = GetView(dependantType);
if (view == null)
{
view = InstantiateViewAndAddToForm(dependantType);
AddView(view);
}
//
// do some binding to your model or whatever here
//
// make the correct view visible
foreach (IView v in Views)
view.Visible = v == view;
}
Could you just create a panel for each object and have a dictionary associate the object type and the panel?
You could just tell the panel to bring to front if they are all the same size, or set all Panels.Visible to be false, and just set the one you need to be true.
I have used DockPanel Suite for applications that require multiple tabs.
It is an open source project, so you can actually modify the code if you wish.
The Suite has many functions, however, if you can just use the Tabs.