I have got labels in my Windows Forms application which are placed next to controls.
When I change my language options to another language, the text needs more space now it covers my control.
Are there any ways to fix this problem?
No magic here I'm afraid. You have to try making your labels as (reasonably) wide as possible to accomodate each of your supported languages. Don't use AutoSize property here.
If labels appears on the left, have your text aligned to the right using the TextAlign property. This way they should always appear close to your control without ever overlapping them.
Also try to use containers to design your forms: TableLayoutPanel, FlowLayoutPanel. Controls that are placed in their cells, are autosized and wordwrapped correctly in most cases.
Related
What would be the best way to make a WinForms application fully scalable, for example when the Form resizes?
In WPF i would use something like a Viewbox and/or a UniformGrid, but something like this doesn't exists in WinForms.
Is there an easier (and maybe faster) way to rescale controls on a from after resizing it, instead of resizing them all by calculating their new Size/Location etc.?
Thanks in advance
In Windows Forms, you use the Anchor and Dock properties for each control.
Here's an article about using them: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/manage-winform-controls-using-the-anchor-and-dock-properties/
You should also look at FlowLayoutPanel and TableLayoutPanel
you can use anchor and dock, depending on your need:
Anchor - the edges of the container to which a control is bound and determines how a control is resized with its parent.
Dock - which control borders are docked to its parent control and determines how a control is resized with its parent.
for further read: Dock and Anchor
Have a look at the Anchor property found on pretty much any control. This allows you to lock a control to any (or all) of the four borders of a window.
Once one distance is anchored (e.g. Top or Right), the control will always try to keep that distance, no matter how you resize your window.
For example, you'd set Anchor to Bottom and Right for a button that is supposed to always stay in the bottom right corner of a window. A text box, that should always fill the window from left to right would use Left and Right.
Similar things can be achieved utilizing Dock, but a docked control will always try to fill as much space as possible (there are different strategies available, like "fill everything from here and upwards) based on its container. Depending on your use case, this can however be a lot harder to control (and I usually only use it if I want a single control to fill a full window, e.g. a TextBox).
If you need more complex alignment, like widths scaled on some kind of ratio (e.g. 30%), then there are several different containers available.
I have developed a windows Application in .Net2010 in Windows 7, Windows Forms and Controls looks Perfact in Windows 7, but in WindowsXP Text containing in Textbox hides first character overlaps between Label and Textbox as shown in Following picture:
The Label controls that you're using to provide a caption for each of the TextBox and ComboBox controls are extending out over the top of the TextBox and ComboBox controls. Their background color is the same as your form (the brownish-gray color).
One possible solution is to change the Z order of your controls so that the Label controls are always in the background. The controls will still overlap, but the TextBox and ComboBox controls will overlap the Label controls instead of the other way around.
That would work fine as long as there was no text on the Label controls getting covered up. That's rather unlikely, and you certainly count on it. Instead, you need to redesign your form so that there is plenty of extra space between controls. You can't jam things up that close to one another, or there won't be any room for expansion and they'll have no choice but to overlap.
Move the controls around and give them some breathing room. The aptly-named Padding property is very useful for this.
You could use TableLayoutPanel to place your controls in a good manner
Go here to read about it.
With this you could use Docking and Anchoring properties of those controls to grow or shrink them as the space changes.
My application (which I am using Visual C# 2008 WinForms for) involves a lot of generated controls. Specifically: grids of buttons, arrays of labels, lists, headings, etc... all populated so that they fit their containers appreciably.
I want users to be able to resize the main form, which obviously would require me to either destroy my generated content, and remake it at the proper size OR I could index through every control, figure out what it is by name and type, and re-size each item individually. I would have to do this while/after the form resizes.
Are there any more intelligent ways of doing this? Dock and Anchor don't quite apply here because I am dealing with items that don't make up 100% of a dimension (for example, grids of buttons).
Hard do give a reasonnable answer without seing just how complex the layout in question is.
But in principle, you should use a layout container such as FlowLayoutPanel or TableLayoutPanel to do the job they were designed to do. If one does not do the job, just nest them.
Docking/anchoring is probably the answer here. You need to anchor your grid to top/bottom/left/right or dock it (same effect, but the grid will fill the parent control).
If this is done right your control(s) will re-size with the rest of the form just as if you created everything in the designer.
I believe something like this would work:
Control.Anchor = AnchorStyles.TopLeft | AnchorStyles.BottomRight;
I have a Form with a TabControl on it.
Onto the TabControl TabPages are dynamically added (FYI: It's about configuration settings for different dynamical loaded modules).
Now I would like to have a way to get the Form - and/or the TabControl on the Form - to adjust its size according to the size of the added TabPage.
While writing this I realize that this could be someway more complicated than I thought: Since the different TabPages can be different in size the Form does have to change its size whenever another TabPage is selected or I have to set it to the size of the biggest TabPage once which seems to be the best approach.
Of course I could set the size programmatically by setting width and height to fitting values but first I need to know if there is no automated way to solve my problem and if not what is the best approach to realize this.
I already tried AutoSize=true which didn't solve my problem. ;)
I'm working with Visual Studio 2005 .Net 2.0 and C#.
First off it's generally considered bad UI practice to have a magically resizing form when all a user is doing is switching tabs.
With that said, I don't think you can do what you're asking to without writing code.
However it should be easy enough to determine the size of the largest control you'll be adding to the tab control, then sizing the form (before its displayed) accordingly. If you set the Anchor properties of the tab control to Ttop,left,right,bottom or set its dock to fill, you'll get the tab control to resize with the form... Of course you'll need to account for the visual padding when computing the form size from a house control.
Using C# 2.0 what is the best way to implement dynamic form controls?
I need to provide a set of controls per data object, so should i just do it manually and lay them out while increment the top value or is there a better way?
You can use panels with automatic layout such as FlowLayoutPanel and TableLayoutPanel.
Unfortunately there are only 2 panels with automatic layout out of box but you can create custom layout panel.
I would recommend you to read following articles:
How to: Create a Resizable Windows Form for Data Entry
Walkthrough: Creating a Resizable Windows Form for Data Entry
Another option would be using of WPF (Windows Presentation Presentation).
WPF is a perfect match for your task.
WPF controls can be hosted in WinForms apps so you don't have to switch to it completely.
#Sam I know this question was about Windows Forms, but you should definitely start looking at WPF. This sort of scenario is really easy in WPF with DataTemplates and TemplateSelectors.
What do you mean by “dynamic”? A new, fixed set of controls for each data row in the data set? Then use a UserControl that contains your controls.
Or do you mean that, depending on your data layout, you want to provide the user with a customized set of controls, say, one TextBox for each column?
Yeah, I've found manually layout out controls (incrementing their Top property by the height of the control plus a margin as I go) to be reasonably effective.
Another approach is to place your controls in Panels with Dock set to Top, so that each successive panel docks up against the one above. Then you can toggle the visibility of individual panels and the controls underneath will snap up to fill the available space. Be aware that this can be a bit unpredictable: showing a hidden panel that's docked can sometimes change its position relative to other docked controls.
Well that's the way we are doing it right now on a project. but that's only useful for simple cases. I suggest you use some sort of template for more complex cases.
For instance I used Reflection to map a certain type of control to a certain property on my domain objects on an older project.
You could try generating the code from templates using t4 see T4 Templates in Visual Studio for Code Generation Screencast for a simple example. You can apply this to WinForms.
Also DevExperience has a nice ( expensive ) framework, see DevExpress eXpressApp Framework™ .