How to find the control that raised an event - c#

I have many custom controls on my main form that utilize an event to signify they have done processing. They all share this same event (~100 controls or so).
The main form consumes this event but I do not have a clue how to find an efficient way at getting to the one that raised the event without having really inefficient code.
My controls are contained within a List<T> called controlList and are hosted on their own project.
My event looks like so:
public void OnTaskComplete(object sender, custom_control_project.TaskCompleteEventArgs e)
{
foreach (var control in controlList)
{
if (control.Visible) // <--- THIS IS WRONG! WHAT COULD THIS BE???
{
try
{
...// LOTS OF PROCESSING!
}
catch
{
...
}
finally
{
...
}
}
}
}
If I want to use less controls, I make them invisible and disabled, hence the control.Visible.
How can I make it so I only do work on the one control that raised the event without having to process so much unneeded iterations?

The sender parameter is the object that raised the event. You can cast this to a control.

Assuming the all of the controls are wired to the same event (which you indicate):
protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
((Button)sender).Visible = true;
// or more generally:
((WebControl)sender).Visible = true;
}
You will need to cast the sender to a common, base type. If you go with a base type, WebControl will allow you to access the Enabled property while Control will not.

Related

How to force a certain Event sequence

I wrote a small control that creates a popup for my Win8 Phone application which does all the nasty things for me like rotation, proper placement etc.
The popup is opened in a Popup control but not on a new phone page.
To close the popup, my control hooks up to the "backKeyPressed" event of the underlying page.
This works like charm until the underlying page has its own implementation of BackKeyPressed event. In this case, the page event is triggered but not the popup control event.
If I would own the event, I could create my own stack to call the last added event first, but I do not own the event of the pages.
As far as I know, I am unable to unregister any previously attached event handler and reassign it once my control unsubscribes from the event.
I could have only one implementation for the BackKeyPressed event which then informs the popup control to close itself (if open), if nothing was open, do the Page specific implementation. But this would require code changes on all pages where I might want to use the popup. Even worse, if I have 5 possible popups, I would have to check all of them :-(
So I am looking for an option to handle this centrally.
What other options do I have to overcome this situation?
Normally you cannot change the order of fired events - they are executed in registered order, but it's not required by specifications - source.
But as Jon Skeet says here:
Summary: For all sane events, you can rely on the ordering. In theory, events can do what they like, but I've never seen an event which doesn't maintain the appropriate ordering.
it is fired in registered order and should be.
BUT for your purpose (I think) you can set an event to invoke your method where you would control the order. I think simple example can show this behaviour:
public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage
{
private List<EventHandler<CancelEventArgs>> listOfHandlers = new List<EventHandler<CancelEventArgs>>();
private void InvokingMethod(object sender, CancelEventArgs e)
{
for (int i = 0; i < listOfHandlers.Count; i++)
listOfHandlers[i](sender, e);
}
public event EventHandler<CancelEventArgs> myBackKeyEvent
{
add { listOfHandlers.Add(value); }
remove { listOfHandlers.Remove(value); }
}
public void AddToTop(EventHandler<CancelEventArgs> eventToAdd)
{
listOfHandlers.Insert(0, eventToAdd);
}
public MainPage()
{
InitializeComponent();
this.BackKeyPress += InvokingMethod;
myBackKeyEvent += (s, e) => { MessageBox.Show("Added first"); e.Cancel = true; };
AddToTop((s, e) => { MessageBox.Show("Added later"); });
}
}

Custom control events don't fire when control collection is cached?

I have a custom control "BedGrid" that contains a collection of custom controls, each of which has a click handler on them. In the Page_Load event of my Parent page, I generate a collection of BedGrids, and wire them up to an event handler. This all works fine, when I generate the BedGrids on each Page_Load... The grandchild is clicked, fires the event up to the BedGrid, which alerts my Parent Page and everything goes as planned.
The problem is, it's slow.. Generating all those custom controls on each Page_Load doesn't make sense (especially with trips to the backend). So, I want to cache the collection of BedGrids like so:
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
DrawBedGrids();
}
protected void DrawBedGrids()
{
if (CachedBedgrids == null)
{
CachedBedgrids = new List<BedGrid>();
//Hit DB here and generate list of buildings....
foreach (Building b in buildings)
{
BedGrid bg = new BedGrid(b);
bg.RaiseAlertParentPage += new EventHandler(BedGrid_Clicked);
CachedBedgrids.Add(bg);
}
}
else
{
foreach (BedGrid bg in CachedBedgrids)
{
somePanel.Controls.Add(bg);
}
}
}
protected List<BedGrid> CachedBedgrids
{
get
{
try { return (List<BedGrid>)Session["CachedBedgrids"]; }
catch { return null; }
}
set { Session["CachedBedgrids"] = value; }
}
And it all breaks.. The events never fire... Even if I add
bg.RaiseAlertParentPage += new EventHandler(BedGrid_Clicked);
to the "else" right before I add the BedGrid to the panel..
What am I missing? All of this is happening in Page_Load, so why is the event not firing? Everything else is fine, meaning that the controls and their children draw properly..
The reason this doesn't work is because the controls must be recreated on the post back, and events wired up, for them to fire.
See, since the server is stateless, to fire an event on an object, that object needs recreated AND readded to the form.
How about cache the database result instead and continue the loop otherwise to build new, add, and hookup the controls?

How to sync up to different events in Winforms

If I have a button which does something and also a double-click event on a data grid which I want to do the same thing, what is the best way to ensure that only one function has to be maintained?
Apart from doing the following, is there any fancy C# way to indicate that two events are to do the same thing?
void button1_Click(...) { MyFunction(); }
void dataGrid1_DoubleClick(...) { MyFunction(); }
void MyFunction() { // do stuff }
I suppose that you are talking about a DataGridView (WinForms) so the signature of the event DoubleClick in the DataGridView and the signature of Click event on a button control is the same.
(An EventHadler). In this case you can simply set the same method using the form designer or manually bind the event
dataGridView1.DoubleClick += new EventHandler(MyFunction);
button1.Click += new EventHandler(MyFunction);
Of course the MyFunction method should match the expected signature of an EventHandler
private void MyFunction(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// do your work
}
Reviewing my answer after a few minutes I wish to add:
If you find yourself in a situation in which you need to differentiate between the controls using the sender object (like Control c = sender as Control; if (c.Name == "someName") ) I really suggest you to return to the first idea. Call a common method but keep the EventHandler separated for each control involved.
Using VS, in the form's designer view You can set the procedure You want to call to each control's each event in the control's properties window.
image
Just to add to what Steve said, you will want to bind these events to your function manually in the Load event of your form, instead of using the events under the lightning bolt in the properties window in the designer, like so:
private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
button1.Click += MyMethod;
dataGridView1.DoubleClick += MyMethod;
}
void MyMethod(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//Do Stuff
}
Also, declaring a new instance of the EventHandler class has been redundant since Anonymous methods were introduced to C#, you can just point the event directly at the method as shown above.

Hooking up generic event handlers to multiple controls of the same type

I have a WinForms app that contains many NumericUpDown controls. In a nutshell, if my users enter a value into the control and then delete the text, I want to restore it (the text) when the control loses focus. So I decided that I'd check .Text when the control loses focus and if it's empty, I set .Text = .Value.ToString().
I'm doing this in the Leave event handler and it works just fine. But as I said, I have many of these controls (18, to be exact). I don't like creating 18 Leave event handlers that all do the same thing so I created a generic one like this:
private void numericUpDown_GenericLeave(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(((NumericUpDown)sender).Text))
((NumericUpDown)sender).Text = ((NumericUpDown)sender).Value.ToString();
}
I started to hook up all of the controls to this generic event handler but I quickly got tired of doing this:
numericUpDown1.Leave += numericUpDown_GenericLeave;
numericUpDown2.Leave += numericUpDown_GenericLeave;
numericUpDown3.Leave += numericUpDown_GenericLeave;
...
numericUpDown18.Leave += numericUpDown_GenericLeave;
So I thought I'd create a function that would return a list of all the controls of a specified type and then loop through that list and hookup the event handlers. That function looks like this:
public static List<Control> GetControlsOfSpecificType(Control container, Type type)
{
var controls = new List<Control>();
foreach (Control ctrl in container.Controls)
{
if (ctrl.GetType() == type)
controls.Add(ctrl);
controls.AddRange(GetControlsOfSpecificType(ctrl, type));
}
return controls;
}
I call the function like this:
var listOfControls = GetControlsOfSpecificType(this, typeof(NumericUpDown));
foreach (var numericUpDownControl in listOfControls)
{
numericUpDownControl.Leave += numericUpDown_GenericLeave;
}
When I run my app, however, I don't see the expected behavior that occurs when I manually hookup each control to the generic event handler. This code is currently in the constructor of my form and I've tried calling it before as well as after the call to InitializeComponent() but neither one seems to be working. I get no error of any kind, I just don't see the behavior that I was expecting. I have a breakpoint set inside the generic event handler but the debugger never breaks so it seems like the event handler isn't being hooked up correctly. Does anyone know why this might be or how I can troubleshoot it further? Thanks!
EDIT
I just realized that the call to:
var listOfControls = GetControlsOfSpecificType(this, typeof(NumericUpDown));
was happening before the call to InitializeComponent() so of course the list of controls being returned was empty. DOH! Thanks for all the replys. I apologize for wasting everyones time. :-(
You're passing this to your method, which is presumably a reference to your form. Your method will only catch the controls that are placed directly on your form. Any NumericUpDown controls that are not directly on the form (i.e. they're sitting on a panel or something) will be missed.
Why not create a user control that has a NumericUpDown control in it.
Then handle this is in the user control events.
This worked for me:
private decimal _previous = 0;
private void numericUpDown1_ValueChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (((NumericUpDown)sender).Text.Length > 0)
{
_previous = this.numericUpDown1.Value;
}
}
private void UserControl1_Leave(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (this.numericUpDown1.Text == "")
{
this.numericUpDown1.Value = _previous;
this.numericUpDown1.Text = System.Convert.ToString(_previous);
}
}
Just note that the Leave event is on the user control not on the updown control itself.
Question answered. See Edit above. Thanks to bsegraves for pointing me in the right direction.

Is there a "All Children loaded" event in WPF

I am listening for the loaded event of a Page. That event fires first and then all the children fire their load event. I need an event that fires when ALL the children have loaded. Does that exist?
I hear you. I also am missing an out of the box solution in WPF for this.
Sometimes you want some code to be executed after all the child controls are loaded.
Put this in the constructor of the parent control
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Loaded, new Action(() => {code that should be executed after all children are loaded} ));
Helped me a few times till now.
Loaded is the event that fires after all children have been Initialized. There is no AfterLoad event as far as I know. If you can, move the children's logic to the Initialized event, and then Loaded will occur after they have all been initialized.
See MSDN - Object Lifetime Events.
You can also use the event: ContentRendered.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms748948.aspx#Window_Lifetime_Events
WPF cant provide that kind of an event since most of the time Data is determining whther to load a particular child to the VisualTree or not (for example UI elements inside a DataTemplate)
So if you can explain your scenario little more clearly we can find a solution specific to that.
One of the options (when content rendered):
this.LayoutUpdated += OnLayoutUpdated;
private void OnLayoutUpdated(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (!isInitialized && this.ActualWidth != 0 && this.ActualHeight != 0)
{
isInitialized = true;
// Logic here
}
};
Put inside your xaml component you want to wait for, a load event Loaded="MyControl_Loaded" like
<Grid Name="Main" Loaded="Grid_Loaded"...>
<TabControl Loaded="TabControl_Loaded"...>
<MyControl Loaded="MyControl_Loaded"...>
...
and in your code
bool isLoaded;
private void MyControl_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
isLoaded = true;
}
Then, inside the Event triggers that have to do something but were triggering before having all components properly loaded, put if(!isLoaded) return; like
private void OnButtonChanged(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
if(!isLoaded) return;
... // code that must execute on trigger BUT after load
}
I ended up doing something along these lines.. your milage may vary.
void WaitForTheKids(Action OnLoaded)
{
// After your children have been added just wait for the Loaded
// event to fire for all of them, then call the OnLoaded delegate
foreach (ContentControl child in Canvas.Children)
{
child.Tag = OnLoaded; // Called after children have loaded
child.Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler(child_Loaded);
}
}
internal void child_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
var cc = sender as ContentControl;
cc.Loaded -= new RoutedEventHandler(child_Loaded);
foreach (ContentControl ctl in Canvas.Children)
{
if (!ctl.IsLoaded)
{
return;
}
}
((Action)cc.Tag)();
}

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