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Winforms GUI controls distribution

I have a winforms tab control which has several tab pages. Within each tab page controls (textboxes, radio buttons, etc...) are group into groupboxes. These group boxes are arranged from top to bottom but in some occassions some groupboxes needs to be visible and other ones to be hidden. Also control within each group box sometimes (depending on the scenario) needs to be visible and sometimes hidden. So I would like to know if someone knows a good approach to do this, maybe some kind of pattern if any. Also it would be good to implement a generic solution to do this. Could any expert in GUI guide me in the right direction to do this?
Using C# and dot NET Framework 4.0, WinForms. This is a desktop application, not Web-based.

You can define the scenarios in a class then add another class that will manage the layout by reading the scenario and laying the elements based on the scenario. I have not provided details because it varies on how specific you want to be and what behavior you want to achieve. It is better to put the Widgets inside a User Control and let that user control communicate with the layout manager.You can use the Mediator pattern or variation of it to coordinate between the widgets. Hope this helps.

I usually try to group related controls into UserControls (even if this means doubling up on some controls) and adding them to or removing them from the form as needed. An example of this could be payment methods - when the user selects a specific payment method (Credit Card, Cash, Cheque, etc) a UserControl with the correct elements is displayed within a panel on the form.
A good pattern to use when managing this sort of set up is Model-View-Presenter, in the example, all the UserControls would probably implement an IPaymentMethod view interface and provide a way to update the corresponding models.

ASP.Net Only 1 Form Restriction: Should I be using a webpage for everything?

I am forced to use Web Forms in my project, and sadly, Web Forms only allow - If I may - "Strict" Websites to be created.
Whenever you need a Button you need to put it in a form, and then you need another button which has nothing to do with the previous button, and you can't have 2 forms,
And the idea of putting a DIV that fires a server side (C#) method is kind of difficult, okay it may be easy but all I have found are "tricks", not an "official" clean way.
So I have this idea of making a webpage for each action in my websites.
For Example:
Let's say I wanna click on the ARROW that raises the rating of this question, I would put something like this.
HTML
Rate Up
And Some CSS Codes to make it look like a beautiful button...
Okay now this will take me to a page called Rating.aspx with 2 parameters, the first parameter is the ID of the question that I would like to raise its rating, and the second parameter is either UP (+rating) or DOWN(-rating).
On the Page Load method of Rating.aspx, I would update the database, then redirect to the question page.
This will work perfectly, BUT, is it a good approach? is it professional? (put in mind that there will be many actions to preform like that...)

With ASP.NET you better use server controls. Better way of implementing that is using or , that actually renders your anchor tag. But you can attach OnClick event handler to this control (link button) so after clicking there would be automatic POST to server. The same page cycle for the current page will take place (this is called PostBack) and your attached event handler will fire, where you can actually make changes to the database. So you don't even need to create any other pages for tasks like this. Every server control has specific set of events like OnClick for buttons or OnSelectedIndexChanged for dropdown lists. You can even create your own controls or derive from existing ones and create your own events.
Take a look on following links for more information:
Button Click
Event Handling in ASP.NET
ASP.NET Page Life Cycle

Creating Repeater Template at runtime and based upon user input

Is it possible to dynamically create an ItemTemplate for a repeater somehow?
I am trying to use a repeater since it allows the most control, but one of my requirements is making me reconsider.
I basically have a number of SQL queries that I do through a web service. Rather than having users type in the entire query I want them to be able to select "parts", "products", or "packages" via radio buttons, enter a search term in a text box, and some other info, and the page returns the results they want. I have this mostly done, the RadioButtons control logic, and I have the query set up to accept the input from the text box as a search term with wildcards. The only probelm is I am struggling with the repeater control. The problem is each one of the tables has a different number of columns and they have different names, so doing a
<td><%# DataBinder.Eval(Container,\"DataItem.Description\") %></td>
within the ItemTemplate is not possible(I don't know until bind time which one of the 3(possibly more in the future)templates to use)
I tried using a literal to pass in what I wanted based on logic in the codebehind, but I couldn't pass the inline functions, and I have been unable to put together how to do this based on an earlier question.
I have been reading the MSDN reference and it seems like if I learn the DataList control it will make things easier, but I'd rather not waste time on that if there's an easy way to do it with a repeater(which will also allow me more control)
Thank you

I may be off track here but I think an easy solution to the problem you're having would be to create multiple repeater controls with different items templates inside them and wrap them up in panels. That way depending on the user parameters you could simply databind your result to the proper repeater and set the other panels to invisible.

I was looking back through some old code for you to see how I've handled similar situations. Then I saw Jesse's answer right before I wrote my reply. Basically, I would tend to agree with Jesse there - that seems the most straightforward solution from what you've outlined.

So I don't know how much this helps, but one possibility would be to use MVC Templates. MVC is handy in that it can actually be used in a very limited sense (your entire app doesn't need to implement it, just the applicable page) and it's also pretty straightforward.
An introduction on how to do different templates within MVC: http://bradwilson.typepad.com/blog/2009/10/aspnet-mvc-2-templates-part-1-introduction.html
It might be possible to modify the template so that it changes based on the object that it's bound to - like how a WPF DataTemplateSelector works.
I thought I remember seeing something in MVC3 or MVC4 that you could create a Template based on a datatype (like you can in Silverlight) and it would automatically pick that Template, but I'm having trouble finding that now.

what is the best way to design a wizard form in ASP.NET MVC

i want to design a form in asp.net in Wizard style. do something in click next.
the form have 3 step
fill your information
add element [here if you type something wrong then you can edit or delete them before going to next step]
finish
what is the best practise to design this in ASP.NET MVC with a power of ajax.
are anyone show me the best way i can use to do this in MVC

Here's how you could proceed: the elements of each step of the wizard could go into a separate div. The Next and Previous buttons will show/hide the corresponding div. On the last step there will be a submit button which would send the entire form to the server.
You might also take a look at the jquery form wizard plugin.

One of the ways that I have implemented a wizard is to have a separate database table that contains all of the information you are required to store and to save/retrieve data to that table in each step of your wizard - obviously depending on the size and purpose of the wizard this may not be sensible with the number of database calls but I was implementing only a 5 page wizard with maximum 5-10 fields on each page. So when you land on a page you query the database and retrieve the information from the database or if it doesn't exist load a blank page where the user can then enter the information and it is saved when they click either Next or Previous.
For navigating between pages I simply built a helper class that accepted the page name and button type (Next/Previous) and had a simple switch statement which would return the page to navigate to and then used that in a RedirectToAction statement. Again this may not suit a larger application but you could also look at using Windows Workflow (touched on in this article http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/29992) as I know that it can be used to create wizard style applications.

It is not particularly an MVC solution but I advise a client-side implementation using JQuery LightBox.

You don't need any client side stuff to achieve this, it's also bad practise to use javascript for anything other than user convenience.
You have 2 problems with a wisard:
1: maintaining state. ie saving data between requests.
2: figuring out which action (usually next or previous) to take.
Maintaining state.
You can use the session object but ideally (and so you can unit test them) all actions should be pure functions. I use hidden inputs to save data between requests.
User actions.
For a next / previous view. Add 2 submit buttons to your form and give them names. When you
POST the form, the button with the none null value was the button pressed. Then redirect to the appropriate action.

Form POST in ASP.NET

I'm trying to convert a classic ASP page to ASP.NET 3.5. The page has several forms on it for several different things.
In ASP.NET, there's a server form control wrapping the entire page, and form controls don't work within a server form control, and you can't have more than one server form control on a page.
So in order to keep this functionality, I can either:
Remove the server form control that's wrapping the page, and leaving the html forms on the page.
Create button click events for every form and perform the POST in the code-behind.
What's the preferred method here?

I wonder if converting to vanilla asp.net (aka webforms) is a bad idea here. Personally I'd go to MVC instead - allows multiple forms etc, and the views are much closer to he HTML, a lot like ASP.
I guess I'm saying there are some glitches vanilla asp.net introduces that you don't have to suffer.

I would go with the second option, any button click is going to post the whole page back anyway so you're not saving any bandwidth. Simply handle each button appropriately.

Check the answer I provided to a similar question here :-)
How to get past embedding a html form for paypal buttons asp.net
If you're going to use different button clicks, you still need to use this override to disable the non-related buttons in each handler, otherwise it won't work. You can only have one form tag at a time - this way you can toggle/disable the ones you're not using as appropriate.
Better still, refactor your application to use a single form. While MVC would be a closer match to the model you're using right now, it wouldn't make sense to go that route unless you were experienced enough with it; Web Forms is an easier jump.