I am designing the UI of my program with a TableLayoutPanel, with each control docked in its cell with Dock = Fill. Since a lot of the controls are similar, I want to use copy-paste to populate the layout. However, the newly pasted control is put in the bottom-left cell by default. Furthermore, since it is docked, I cannot move it in the designer, so the only way I could put it in the correct cell is by setting Dock = None, drag it, then setting Dock = Fill again. This is very annoying, and to some extent defeats the purpose to use copy-paste in the first place (to avoid forgetting to set Dock). Are there any better ways I can create such a layout?
I just found out that, when put into a TableLayoutPanel, the control has a Cell property. Modifying it allows me to move the control within the TableLayoutPanel without first undocking it.
Of course, Hans Passant's suggestion of first moving the controls, then mass-set the Dock property also works.
Related
I am new to the winforms and want to create an application that will have a scroll section which I need to make for the buttons which I will add on runtime.
The user will press an add button to add a button containing data which will then be used for the title, description. I need the button to be added to the scroll section and to be automatically placed under the last button in the section so it is organized and so I can scroll up and down through the section.
Like the image has with the scroll bar and the buttons:
How do I solve the problem?
You can use a FlowLayoutPanel with the following properties set:
AutoScroll = true;
FlowDirection = FlowDirection.TopDown;
WrapContents = false;
Once you do that, you can add buttons (or any control) to the Controls collection and it should flow from top to bottom and cause vertical scrollbars to appear once you fill the space.
Note, that it is quite difficult (or virtually impossible) to make a WinForms app look as nice as the one you provided an example of. You would probably be better off using WPF. But my answer should at least solve your particular problem with WinForms.
I have a SplitContainer on my form that has its Dock property set to Fill. It contains several child controls, many of which have event handlers attached to them. Later I decide to put a StatusStrip at the bottom of my form. Guess what, I can't set the StatusStrip to dock to the bottom of my form. The SplitContainer will continue to Fill the entire form. Even though the StatusStrip apparently gets docked to the bottom, it actually hides the bottom part of the SplitContainer behind it.
The only around it is to CUT the SplitContainer and then PASTE it back. Cutting the SplitContainer makes the StatusStrip the only control on my form and thus lets it capture the bottom docking. Afterwards, pasting the SplitContainer allows it to fill the remaining area. In short, docking uses First Come, First Serve method.
Now since my controls have lots of event handlers attached to them, cutting and pasting becomes a nightmare for me. Having my project in C# means I have to attach all those event handlers manually.
Is there a better work around?
This is a z-order issue between the splitter and the statusstrip. When you have a control you want to dock fill and one or more controls you want to dock top, left, right, or bottom, you have to have the fill control be the first in the z-order.
The better way is to open the Document Outline tool, select the SplitContainer and use the up or down buttons to change its z-order.
I should add that in Winforms the z-order is specified by the order in which you add controls to the Controls collection. That order determines the order the associated system controls are created, hence their z-order. Using the Document Outline tool to alter z-order simply causes the generated code to be re-ordered.
This is in winforms. I am creating a User control that is basically a FlowlayoutControl filled with other User Controls. I need each of the controls added to be docked to the top of the previous (from left to right). Unfortunately it looks like the flowlayoutcontrol ignores any of the docking properties. Is there any way to dock the controls inside there? I need it to fill the item from left to right, but the items should be laid out like a list view. Theres really no code i can provide due to the fact that its a matter of figuring out what approach to take.
Getting the FlowLayoutPanel to dock right is tricky. From the original question, you want something like a list view. It's important to know that ONE of the items in your list (the widest one) defines a "virtual column" in the FlowLayoutPanel. The rest of the items will follow it. You can prove this in the VS designer by dragging one of the items to the right. The 'virtual column' will follow it, and if your other items are anchored they will follow the virtual column.
Note that you can't anchor the control that is defining the column. It has nothing to anchor to and strange things will happen.
Do do all this programatically, handle the Layout event on your FlowLayoutPanel and put code similar to the code below. It's important that in the designer all the items in your list are not docked and and have their anchoring set to 'none'. I spent a day on this yesterday and doing that in the designer is what made the code below work.
flowLayoutPanel.Controls[0].Dock = DockStyle.None;
flowLayoutPanel.Controls[0].Width = flowLayoutPanel.DisplayRectangle.Width - lowLayoutPanel.Controls[0].Margin.Horizontal;
for (int i = 1; i < flowLayoutPanel.Controls.Count; i++)
{
flowLayoutPanel.Controls[i].Dock = DockStyle.Top;
}
FlowLayoutPanel.FlowDirection Property indicates the flow direction of the FlowLayoutPanel control.
FlowLayoutPanel.WrapContents Property indicates whether the FlowLayoutPanel control should wrap its contents or let the contents be clipped.
The docking properties of the FlowLayoutPanel are for the panel itself (like if you wanted the FlowLayoutPanel docked to the left of the form, etc.), not the container of controls inside of it.
Try playing with the DefaultPadding and DefaultMargin properties, these apply to the spacing of the controls it contains
I have a TableLayoutPanel that has several TableLayoutPanels inside it. The amount changes dynamically and will almost always be too many to be able to fit inside the form.I need it to have a scroll bar so I can view the entire component.
I have tried setting the autoscroll property on the main panel to true and docking it and/or setting a maximum size. What the controler does instead, is to try and fit ALL of the Panel inside the form therefore changing the size of its inside components and squeezing them all together instead of creating a scroll bar to scroll through my Panel.
Do you guys know what I might be doing wrong?
Thanks.
Jose
PS: I am using VS 2010
I had the same issue one day and found out that the problem was that I had a "MinimumSize" set to the TableLayoutPanel. That caused the control to keep a minimum height no matter what the Dock and/or Anchor constraints, preventing the AutoScroll feature to work properly. Since that feature is based on a simple check on the Y coordinates of all children controls of a control against that control's height, the scrollbar was not appearing despite the fact the the TableLayoutPanel's child controls were "disapearing" out of sight due to its parent control clip area.
So in other words, check the MinimumSize property of TableLayoutPanel and make sure it's empty.
Maybe this will help.
if it still doesn't work, try put a panel and then put the tableLayoutPanel into that panel. Set to true the autoScroll property of the panel.
I had the same thing happen on my project. All my controls were squished inside the TableLayoutPanel. In my case, I was rendering many of the controls as ColumnStyle.Percent. Switching this to ColumnStyle.Autosize was the fix I needed.
I assume you've set these properties as well, but just in case my TableLayoutPanels also use the following settings:
AutoSize = true;
AutoSizeMode = AutoSizeMode.GrowAndShrink;
AutoScroll = true;
Late answer, but I've been fighting with a complex layout recently and was looking for a solution to get my scrolling working on a screen with far too many fields. Honestly, better design should avoid this problem 99% of the time but sometimes your hands are just tied.
The Problem
The problem seems to be that if you're nested too deeply with multiple grids, groups, and panels they stop reporting properly to parent controls that their contents have overflown the size of the current screen. Actually, the problem is probably that the controls are all set to dock fill and do fit within their parent control, so the top level control doesn't know that the contents of its great-great-great-great-grandchild controls don't fit.
Solution
The trick to fix this seems to be manually forcing the top most panel to scroll at a certain minimum size:
MainPanel.AutoSize = true;
MainPanel.AutoScrollMinSize = new Size(400, 500);
TableLayoutPanel scrolling is full of bugs.
The solution to make it work correctly is here.
I'm new to Windows Forms in Visual Studio, and I am wondering how to automaticly resize controls to the window size.
Say, I have 2 controls in a panel, a List Box and a Button. I want the button to dock to the bottom, and I want the List Box to fit the rest of the space. when the window resizes, the button should be at the bottom (as expected with docking), and the list box should stretch down to the button.
Is there a way to do this without any code?
Thanks.
Dock is pretty easy to use, but I recommend using the Anchor properties instead. Resize your form to a reasonable size in the Designer. Then, place your controls to look the way you want. Then, decide which controls should resize with the form and set the Anchor property as follows:
If you want the control to resize with the form in width, set the Right anchor.
If you want to resize height, set the Bottom anchor.
If you want the control to stay right when the form resizes, unset the Left anchor.
If you want the control to stay bottom when the form resizes, unset the Top anchor.
The problem I have with Docks is that they sometimes act funny when controls are not declared in a specific order, and to get the effect you want, sometimes you have to create extraneous panels just to hold controls.
It really gets messy when you want to maintain the aspect ratio of each control. One way, which is not really up to the mark if you want to get into fixing the details, is to use TableLayoutPanel and use Dock and Anchor wisely to achieve what you want.
Use the dock and fill options on the controls. Look under properties for each object, and containers if they are in any.
You can use SplitContainer
Google for examples. Here is one
Try setting your ListBox's Dock property to Fill.
You'll need to watch for one thing though: by default the ListBox will size itself to display whole list items. If you resize the control so that it displays a partial item it will adjust itself so it will display a complete item. This can make the control appear to lose its 'Dock'ing behavior. The solution for this is to set the ListBox's IntegralHeight property to false, which specifies that the control not resize itself to fit complete items.