I have been working for months on a project in c# in Visual Studio 2010 (it interfaces with a camera, power supplies, and motion control). There is a form with many controls on it (radio buttons, buttons, text boxes, bitmap displays...). Now I would like to put all of that on a tab so i can have another tab. This is so that the second tab can have all the default settings on it (e.g, portnumber, baud rate, integration times, pathname...).
Is this doable? Is there a way to cut and paste or click and drag?
Update:
I created a form, put a button on it that when clicked displays a message box with "Hello World". Then i added a tab control to the form, and dragged the button onto the first tab. The button still functions in the same way, displaying the message box when clicked.
So on my big form, i added a tabcontrol. Without resizing it, i did a select all, then unselected the tabcontrol, then dragged everything onto the tab. I then moved the tab control and resized it, then iteratively resized the tab window and moved all the controls. this worked, except the picturebox controls somehow got resized so they were larger than a screen width. Resized the pictureboxes and everything works. (perhaps i just needed the encouragement to give it a try...sorry if not the best question:).
To do this in code, in Form1.Designer.cs can add:
this.tabPage1.Controls.Add(this.button1);
However, I would have to do this for every single control (about 200 of them in Designer.cs).
This can usually be done with some editing of the .Designer.cs file. First, make sure you make a backup in case it all goes horribly wrong. Place the tab control and add a single control (a button or anything) to it. Then examine the .Designer.cs file. As you point out yourself, you will see a line like this:
this.tabPage1.Controls.Add(this.button1);
As for the existing controls on the form, there will be a bunch of lines like this:
this.Controls.Add(this.meErrorReport);
this.Controls.Add(this.peWarningSign);
this.Controls.Add(this.meHeaderText);
this.Controls.Add(this.btnClose);
So what you do is to cut these lines (not including the one for the tab control!), and paste them just following the line shown above, and do a find-and-replace to change them so they match the first one:
this.tabPage1.Controls.Add(this.meErrorReport);
this.tabPage1.Controls.Add(this.peWarningSign);
this.tabPage1.Controls.Add(this.meHeaderText);
this.tabPage1.Controls.Add(this.btnClose);
This should usually do the trick. The controls may be positioned wrong, and most will be hidden until you increase the size of the tab control, but these are minor problems that can be fixed.
PS. I know you've already fixed your problem, but I'm posting this answer in case it can help you, or someone else, in the future.
Related
let's say I want to make program settings menu like:
Many tab options that change the layout of the rest of the window
My program is in C# and I'm making it in Visual Studio
I tried to do it 2 ways:
Make the window super large with all possible layouts in the Form designer and then just resizing it to fit one of them at the time but this method works for like 4 tabs when you can fit them all at 1 screen. If it's large you have to work with slide bars and that's really impractical, laggy and for many tabs you even have to search them
Not using Form designer at all and hand write all the declarations, positions, sizes, colors etc. But like this it takes pretty a while even just to set up 1 button and there is no way I can fast see how it looks like
So the question is: Is there a magic way I don't know about to do this? And how is this made professionally?
Simple solution for small number of views
You can use a TextBox and ListView docked in a Panel docked left.
And a ControlTab docked fill in a panel named for example PanelMain docked fill at right with visible at false.
You will create any tabpage as option. In each tabpage you will put a panel docked fill and dedicated content in. On the listview item click event or itemchange, you will set the tabpage panel parent to PanelMain.
The little problem can be about spacing and the code file can be large (regions can be used).
Advanced solution more clean for several views
You can use the standard multipage pattern with one form per option/view, and do the same thing as exposed previously.
You create one form per view and put a panel docked fill embedding controls.
When the user click on the menu, you set the form main panel parent to the option form or the main panel of the options form.
I hope I haven't written too badly in unverified English.
Feel free to open any new question centered on any atomic and code problem on this subject.
I am working on a Win Forms application which has tab and many tab pages are there. All of these are having many contorls on them. I need to manage form's top,left, right and bottom margins. Before I was managing this manaually by selecting and moving controls/ labels and by trying to make there margin equal but it is a little hard after some tabs to manage margions of form and contorls in form and also between controls.
Please advice what can be best and professional way to manage this.
Edit
My conrol heraricy is as below:
Form > Tab Contorl > Tab Page > Form Spliter > Input Controls
Form Spliter is Dock to Left.
Set each tab page's Padding property (it's in the Property Grid in the Properties panel). It will help with aligning controls using the visual designer. Also make sure you're using the Anchor property to handle resizing without needing to write your own code.
Note that if you have a form with lots of tab pages with lots of controls on, chances are you're doing something wrong.
The best approach is to create a composite UserControl for each tab page. It really does simplify things.
Instead of moving controls one by one , you can use the easiest way. Click on the window then Press ctrl+A then press Arrow Buttons. This helped a lot for me.
I'm experiencing difficulty with a custom-made User Control, and my searching on Stack Overflow, MSDN, and Google didn't pop up any troubles quite like the one I'm experiencing.
I have a very simple User Control: It's a label, a text box, and a button, with a SaveFileDialog and a FolderSelectDialog available. The text box and button are anchored Left,Right and Right respectively, with the intent that if the control is resized larger, the text box will enlarge to fill the gap, and the button will stay on the right edge of the control.
The problem I am encountering is that when the control is enlarged, the area to the right of the default width of the control becomes blank space when the project is built and run. The pictures here will illustrate what I mean:
In editor:
Running:
The control is smallish in its design window, but when I add it to a form and widen it, it behaves as intended. However, when I run the form the control was added to, half the control isn't visible.
I suspect that I'm overlooking something fairly straightforward, but I wasn't able to find anything addressing this point in my search. Help would be much appreciated.
My guess is that there is a panel or something that is added to your control and will be brought to front somehow runtime.
from property window's top there's a combo from which you can select all the controls in your User Control.
check if all the controls are what you want.
if you find that panel or anything delete it :)
EDIT:
alright this was not your problem.
now I can only assume that you have set some manual sizes to your user control, i.e. in its constructor. in that case designer will show the correct size of you user control,
now some other place in your code, you have set the user controls size manually again. if the layout is suspended and size changes, I think that the anchored controls' size will not change automatically.
if this is your problem, it is probably hard to find.
How can I assign a background image to tabpage control in Visual Studio C# 2010? I am able to provide background image to each of the tab separately, but I cannot do it so for the whole tabpage control, due to which a portion of tabpage control remain with different background and each of the tab pages has ok and fine background.
Here is the picture of my form:
See the 'grey-colored' region in the tabs line. How can I cover the whole tabpage control with one single background?
The header area that contains the tabs is not part of your tab page. It's part of the parent TabControl, which is automatically drawn for you by Windows.
If you want to change how it looks, you'll have to draw it yourself. That's called owner-drawing, and it's not exactly a trivial undertaking, especially for a complicated control like this one. For starters, you can't just use OwnerDrawFixed, because that just allows you to custom draw the contents of the tabs (for example, to change the font). You will need to owner draw the entire tab control.
I can't imagine a good reason that you would ever want do this, but you'll find a few samples online that might help get you started. For example:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mdaudi100/alternate/tabcontrols.html
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/tabs/flattabcontrol.aspx
Finishing up a register form in a C# application and I noticed with the panel if I enable AutoScroll and then have a textbox that is below the scroll and click on it it jumps all the way back up to the top. Is there a way to fix this with some code or is it a propriety?
It's a little difficult for me to explain it in words, so here's a short video that shows the behavior.
I have had the same problem. I fixed it with this code in my panel:
protected override Point ScrollToControl(Control activeControl)
{
return this.AutoScrollPosition;
}
I had this exact problem. I had to remove the docking from my panels on the form and this fixed the problem.
Since apparently no one has seen this behavior before and could provide a quick answer, I opened up Visual Studio to try and reproduce what you describe.
I created a new WinForms project with a GroupBox containing a Panel whose AutoScroll property is set to "True". Then, I added two new GroupBox controls inside of the Panel, each containing two TextBox controls. The first embedded GroupBox is at the top of the form, entirely visible at startup; the second embedded GroupBox is at the bottom where it must be scrolled into view. This is equivalent to the design/layout that you have as best I can tell from your description and video.
However, when I run the project, scroll down to the second embedded GroupBox and select one of the TextBox controls that it contains, it performs exactly as expected. The TextBox control that I clicked on gets the focus, without scrolling the entire panel back up to the top. I can't seem to reproduce what you're seeing. If you could either tell me what I've done wrong in designing my test sample or post the smallest sample project needed to recreate the behavior you're experiencing, I might be able to help.
Otherwise, here are a few suggestions of things to investigate:
The tab order of the objects on your form. This really shouldn't be causing the behavior described because clicking on a control should set the focus to that control, regardless of its position in the tab order, and jumbling up the tab order multiple times in my sample project still doesn't appear to have the same effect. But I suppose it's worth a try anyway. In Design Mode, go to your "View" menu, and click "Tab Order". All of the controls that you can set the tab order for will have a little colored box at their top-left corner, indicating their tab order in each container. To set the tab order, click once on each of the controls in the natural order you want them to be focused.
Scour your code for any <Control>.Focus or <Control.Select> statements. Make sure that you don't have any validation code that's altering the tab order in any way during run-time. This could be causing focus to jump back to a control located near the top of your Panel, forcing it to auto-scroll to the new location.
Try to reproduce the behavior in a brand new, clean project. Ideally, create a new project in Visual Studio and lay out the controls the exact same way you have them in the project with which you're experiencing difficulties. This is the same thing I did, partly because I don't have your particular project to work with, and also because this is the best way to troubleshoot particularly tricky behavior. It's more likely there is some quirk to your design or source code that's causing this behavior, rather than some kind of bug in the controls themselves. But either way, this will let you know exactly where the problem is occurring, which will get you that much closer to a solution.
You can use TableLayoutPanel" instead of "Panel" to avoid scrollbar change its position.