I have the master details "pattern" in a windows form.
For example, I have a bill (master) with a list of items (details) the user will add.
However, the user will add the items manually.
In order to achieve this, I used the data repeater but it caused a lot of problems when the scroll appears.
I spent several hours trying to fix this issue (the selected value in the combobox in the repeater gets mixed as the user scrolls down).
Are there any other controls anyone ever used for the same purpose?
I don't thing the DataGridView will provide me with the same flexibility.
Also building a complete set of dynamic controls is a huge overload.
Suggestions?
Note: I m using .net framework 4.5
Please forgive any silly words I may say. I am coming from a Actionscript3 background.
I am using "Visual C# 2010 Express".
I have a simple Form, in a WindowsForm Project, which currently holds just a Listbox. (Which I presume I will have to change to something else).
And I made myself a different display object (User Control) that is currently a Checkbox a title. (More will be added once I get over the hurdle below)
But I can't even get as far as Displaying the UserControl as a list.
I can't seem to find anywhere on the listbox to say "User this displayobject as the visual for listbox". I see tutorials saying "ItemsPanelTemplate" but I get error saying there is no such property for a Listbox.
I even tried making the Form in Design view and it is not in the list down the side of the GUI when I dragged as Listbox on screen.
Now I know how I would do this in pure Actionscript, but I dont know how to do this in Pure C#. Tutorials are not helping, as all the Microsoft site seems to try to give me is XAML (XML). and I am looking for C# code. So I have thrown in the towel and pleading for outside help.
Thank you for any help you can give.
It sounds like you want a list of items, each with a CheckBox and some descriptive text. Try using the CheckedListBox control. MSDN link.
This question also answers the question of how to do custom image drawing for each item in a ListBox. It may be helpful.
Edit after clarification:
Try embedding the UserControl in a ListView, rather than a ListBox.
References on embedding controls in ListViews:
C# listview - embedding controls
Adding button into a Listview in WinForms
You could also use a list of Panels, with each Panel hosting a UserControl.
C# List of Panels
But the real answer, as seen in the question's comments, is that Winforms doesn't have a convenient way to do this. This is a task much better suited to WPF.
You may check out freeware component Better ListView Express from ComponentOwl. It supports simple Details view without columns, two and three-state checkboxes, images and more...
They also offers full version with even more nice features like hierarchical and multi-line items.
Windows Form (in C#) - I need to create a custom listbox control for the following requirement:
There is a listbox with a long list of items. I want the user to be able to click in the list, and then start typing and have it automatically take them to the matching item (I call this "type ahead"). It needs to be able to do this for as many characters as they type that have a match.
This control should be really reusable without much changes.
What are things/points I should keep in mind while developing a reusable custom control? (if you provide a good pattern as a sample... will be more helpful)
In Real World scenario the first decision should be buy vs build. if your application is a serious one and not just for hobby and there is budget for it I would check some of those great controls collections like DevExpress or Telerik for WinForms. You would need a grid as well at some point, eventually, and surely your custom or framework one cannot compete theirs.
I refer to those libraries because i believe they already have a listbox with autocomplete as you described in your requirements. check the online demos on their websites...
I am looking into developing a GUI that will switch the controls based on the value of the selected combo box item.
I have tried adding a different canvas or grid to the gui designer in visual studio but it comes hard to manage as everything overlaps each other in the designer and is hard to know what's what.
Is there an easy way that I can do this, is there a particular control that makes this easy to achieve. I don't really want code the gui in c# and not use xaml.
What I was hoping to do is that all the controls are in there own panel and when the combo box value is changed one panel is removed or hidden and the other is shown.
How can something like this be achieved.
Thanks for any help you can provide
You could implement each different "mode" as a separate UserControl.
Then have a shell with the combobox, where the combobox OnChange will swap out what UserControl is plugged into the shell.
Any other totally common components such as OK/cancel buttons could be part of the shell.
A completely alternative implementation to consider is a tabbed approach, but that probably only flies if it makes sense for the user to act on several of them.
What will you do if the user selects A in the combo, makes changes in UserControlForA, and then selects B in the combo? Could be an annoying corner case, and if this is production code the sort of thing that you'll get future user requests to change how it works.
If you're sure of the design go for it. If not, I'd play around with a few apps and try to find a nice example of the same sort of thing, and consider how they approached it.
But techwise I think a UserControl is what you're describing.
(Edit: crud just saw the xaml/wpf in the question, not sure this is correct in that context, clueless there)
You can use DataTemplate for each different mode.See Different item template for each item in a WPF List for more information.
I'm building a C# client app that allows a user to communicate with one or more existing users in a system via an email-like metaphor. I'd like to present the user with a text entry box that auto-completes on known email addresses, and allows multiple delimiter-separated addresses to be entered. Ideally, I'd also like the email addresses to turn into structured controls once they've been entered and recognized. Basically, I'm modeling the UI interaction for adding users after Facebook's model.
Are there any Windows Forms controls out there with the ability to do something like this? Is there any well-established terminology for a hybrid textbox / control list box (no, not a ComboBox) or something that I should be searching for?
Thanks,
-Patrick
I have had good luck in the past creating composite user-controls to provide specific functionality using native .NET Winforms controls. It works pretty good as long as there aren't too many of them, in which case things start to slow down.
In you case, and this is just off the top of my head, but, perhaps you could take a FlowLayoutPanel, a Button, and a Textbox which supports auto-complete and put these together to create a control that would provide the functionality you are looking for.
If there are no addresses selected in the control (e.g. in a List<string>), then the container (FlowLayoutPanel) would only display the TextBox. Once the user selected an entry, the control would automatically create a Button with the appropriate caption and insert it to the left in the FlowLayoutPanel. If the user removes an address he/she has already selected, simply remove its representation (the button) from the FlowLayoutPanel, and the TextBox can resize accordingly. There may be issues with getting the TextBox to fill up the remaining space (I can't remember how to do that), but you get the idea. The container does not have to be FlowLayoutPanel - you could use a Panel with Docked controls, or even a TableLayoutPanel for this.
A design as I described would allow the user to delete the address by clicking on the button. However, without some other visual cues, that isn't very intuitive or user-friendly, so I would consider making the "Button" be another composite control which contains a "prettied-up" label along with an tiny delete Button (X) to the right. For this you could use a Panel control and dock the X button to the right, and fill the Label on the left. You would provide public properties here as needed to control the text and provide an event handler or callback for the delete functionality.
Once the visual stuff is working, all that is left is to provide the appropriate Properties and Methods on the main control to allow it to interact as needed with outside code.
As a simple, "poor man's", implementation you could take a look at the AutoComplete* properties of the TextBox control. You could dynamically populate the AutoCompleteSource with your known addresses and when an entry matches, add to a separate, list-style control of your choice.
See this SO article for some interesting code snippets related to your question, and my suggested workaround.
Beyond the built-in AUtoComplete properties you're probably looking at having to purchase a 3rd party control from a tools vendor.
I've not seen anything like that before in WinForms. In WPF it would be another matter - if you can use that, maybe consider hosting a WPF control within your WinForms application instead?
I think you're trying to do something similar to this codeproject article: AutoComplete TextBox
And since you mention WPF in a comment, you also have this article: WPF AutoComplete Folder TextBox (should be easy enough to cut out the folder bit of the article I'd thought).
Well, there isn't such a control. If I were you, I'd create 2 textboxes to do the job. See, a normal textbox can easily be configured for autocomplete from a list, even dynamically; however, it accepts only one entry at a time.
So, I suggest you dedicate one textbox for autocomplete, and one for the addresses. So, whenever there is a qualified email address in the first textbox, and you click enter, the address gets added to the address textbox, and automatically add delimitation.
Then you need to handle the addresses in the address textbox as objects instead of characters. Code it in a way that when a user tries to delete a character in an address, the whole address is deleted.
This is the workaround I can think of. I'll help with the code if you give it a try.