I've created a simple dialog here with a list of people. All I want to do is a few simple things which are rather trivial in winforms. However I'm struggling to grasp how to do this in wpf with an mvvm approach. Could someone help me out please.
When the user hits the Add New Person button, I want a dialog to appear where a user can type in their Name and either hit OK or Cancel. If the user hits OK, it appends the person to the list. (keep in mind i'll add more edting fields for the users to input, for example last name...)
When the users has a single item in the list selected, i want them to give them the ability to click an 'edit' button showing a dialog similar to the one in the previous step, pre populated with the selected items data, so a user can edit the properties. Then depending on if they hit OK or Cancel the changes are committed.
Dropbox solution: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8sjpabfod08yil5/AddDeleteItems_basic.zip?dl=
To create and display dialogs using MVVM, you'll want to implement a dialog service pattern to handle such requests. This service would be called from within your view model.
There is a really informative Code Project article about this very topic (Showing Dialogs When Using The MVVM Pattern. My advice would be to read that article and then look through the source files accompanying the article. This should provide you with a very good starting point to achieve your use cases (custom dialogs) and can also be used for displaying standard dialogs too (e.g. open file, save file, browse folder etc).
The service pattern isn't the only way to implement this, in the following article I show how to do it using the same data-driven mechanism used for regular windows:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/820324/Implementing-Dialog-Boxes-in-MVVM
I suggest this tutorial for you to get started. However, for the dialog Xceed library has some cool custom controls that may help you.
Related
I'm trying to show an alert with an entry inside it, as I can see it in a lot of apps, but I could'n t find a solution for now (neither custom renders)
Any suggestions?
You can use UserDialogs libary
After initialization simply use:
UserDialogs.Instance.Alert("message")
You can do that in multiple ways. Lets say if you have your own UI and the Entry field. Then you can create the Popup Page and Display that Popup Page whenever necessary for the User Input. If you want to use Popup Page (best - only if you have requirements to have your own style of prompt):
https://github.com/rotorgames/Rg.Plugins.Popup
If you have very simple requirement of only Showing the Entry Field the use :
https://github.com/aritchie/userdialogs
Since this is very common question and have all the resources online. Please go through the websites above have all the examples you can look into. Please let me know if you still need any more help.
I am using Microsoft Bot Framework with C# and my requirement is to show few images one by one to user and get feedback on each of them by click of button.
Later I need to process all the inputs collected.
I have implemented this logic inside a single step dialog within a waterfall.
I was trying to implement it by calling the same dialog again until all images have been shown to user, but the problem is that either same image keeps coming again and again or only one image is shown.
I wanted to know if this approach is feasible to achieve the desired functionality or I should consider taking any other approach
For example the twitter application you can open one profile and see his tweets then open another profile and go and repeat the same action over and over again, then you can tap on the back button as many times you opened tweets and profiles etc, returning from the same path.
a code example would help me a lot :)
You are looking for examples of a UINavigationController. This allows you to push new UIViewControllers into the navigation hierarchy and helps manage popping the view controllers off when you hit the back button (you can do this programatically also).
There are a bunch of articles on MonoTouch.Info about UINavigationControllers. I think that would be the best starting point for you.
All in WPF:
Developing a wizard application, user has to answer a number of simple questions before brought to the main app. The main app is then prefilled with the information obtained from the wizard.
I started with a Window which I then planned to add usercontrols to. The main window would have the user control in the first row, then Next and Previous buttons to control moving between the controls in the second row. This way I could easily control the logic to switch between screens like:
WizardControl1.IsVisible = false;
WizardControl2.IsVisible = true;
But for some reason, user controls do not have setter for IsVisible. Hurray.
So then I thought I would just use seperate windows for each section of the wizard. The problem with this approach is that now when stepping between, the window opens in random positions, and by steppign through the wizard with next, the next window pops up randomly which is really distracting and frustrating.
So how can I develop a wizard properly? I don't get why this is so hard...not exactly rocket science... replacing text and controls and storing input after pressing next/previous!
Thanks
Check this link:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/InternationalizedWizard.aspx
This is the article about building wizard in WPF by Josh Smith, it's seems to be nice pattern.
I found it's helpful for me, hope you'll too.
There is also an open source Avalon Wizard control on codeplex.
I'd probably aproach this using data binding and template selectors. Have the wizard form bind to a "WizardData" class, which exposes a list of "WizardPage" base classes.
The WizardData class can expose properties defining the correct info on the forms, and display a control for the main page that uses a template selector to determine the proper control to display based on the actual type of the particular wizard page.
It sounds like more work than it is, really. It also gives you the benefit of good separation between code and UI (all "work" is done by the WizardData and WizardPage classes), and the ability to test logic independent of the UI.
It's also a very WPF/MVVM way of approaching the problem.
I recognize this does not directly address your question, but I thought I'd mention it as a possible alternative. I've used Actipro's Wizard control with pretty good results, and when I have needed support, they have been very responsive. I am not affiliated with them in any way; I just like not having to write the plumbing to manage a wizard.
The property is called "Visibility".
I find that I do better when I dynamically add and removing controls rather than hide them.
I was looking for a Wizard solution too. I have the need to stick with stock WPF components so I implemented the wizard using a standard form and a tab control.
I only hide the tabs at runtime so there available in the IDE. At runtime just use Back, Next, Finish... to navigate thru the tab items
works good
I'm searching a C# component or code snipped that does something like that:
I want to inform new users about the most important program functions if he opens a new window for example.
It should be a box showing text (formated if possible) that is of course not modal and has some mechanism to 'go out of the way' if the user enters the textbox area. So that he can access what's underneath it. Alternativly the window could also stick to the border of the window, but there needs to be a way that this also works if the window is maximized.
So I want to present him with a short introduction of what he can do in every corner of my app most painlessly.
Thank you!
I use a "bar" at the top of every window to display some information about the current window/dialog.
Use tooltips. They can be programmatically controlled, and you can have them appear at will. You'll need to add the functionality to your app to keep track of what tooltips have been shown to the user already.
You can add a "balloon" style by setting the IsBalloon property to true.
You can also replace them with smaller descriptions for when the user wants to hover over the control and have them displayed again.
I'm already using tooltips heavily. However, they aren't very practical when displaying bigger amounts of data and they are bound to specific user actions.
Have you considered having a contextual menu for each form / page which contains links to Adobe Captivate style presentations for each available task? That way the user can investigate an example of how to achieve a task relating to what they are trying to achieve from within the application / site.
This approach would require a good deal of maintenance and management if your code changes regularly but coordinating it with a training department can provide rich help features in your application.
See http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate/ for more information.