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.
Related
I have a WinForm form that has two DataGridView controls paced on it such that they are stacked, one above the other against the right hand side of the form.
I would like a way of setting them so that when I expand the form, they expand height-wise with it, as well as width-wise. I managed width-wise by anchoring them to the left and right sides and anchoring the top one to the top and the bottom one to the bottom. However, from here I'm not sure how to get them to use up the space in the middle that appears when the form maximizes...Maybe an image will make my meaning clearer:
Normal Size:
Maxmized; I'd like the grids to expand to take up the full height of the form between the two of them as the red arrows show:
If this question is blindingly obvious I apologise and can only say I didn't really know how to phrase it properly and so found searching for it on Google unhelpful!
You have two options:
TableLayoutPanel or
SplitContainer
The former lets you create a table of many columns and/or rows with various sizing options from absolute and percent to autosize. This is very powerful for layout; but in other respects TLPs are somewhat restricted as the 'cells' are only virtual..
A SplitContainer offers only two panes but lets you treat each with all the things you can do to a container: add one or more controls, anchor or dock them, give each pane a BackColor and make use of its event model.
So if you need just two controls of equal size that adapt to the form size like you showed in the question, a SplitContainer is maybe the better option.
Set the splitter to fixed and make it smaller, anchor the SplitContainer to all sides and drop the DGVs into their panes and Dock them to Fill.
You could also make the splitter moveable to allow the user to resize the panes; if you do that do make the splitter width larger..
Also make sure that the FixedPanel is set to None so that height changes are shared.
Hint: If you want a few more panes to share the space you can nest several SplitContainers.. But for larger numbers do consider switching to TLP!
Basically, I want everything (Controls etc) to scale with the WindowsForm when resizing it by dragging, so that the user can determine the size of the UI himself.
The picture is not perfect, but I hope it explains it:
The easiest way to do this would be to use a (Flow/Table)LayoutPanel and the appropriate Anchor/Drop properties, but I feel like that restricts my design, which currently looks like this:
My idea was to scale all the components when Resize() is called:
foreach(Control c in Controls){
c.Scale(scaleFactor);
}
My problems are: Locations aren't set properly and the rounding needed to determine the 'scaleFactor' leads to inconsistencies.
Is there a clean way to do all this? Do I have to use LayoutPanels to get a clean way?
Are you sure that you want to zoom those text boxes and labels, too? Text boxes have a fairly standard height, for example. What do you expect if the window is so small that the text is too large for the buttons/text boxes, etc.?
The typical resizing logic of the contents of a resizable window is a little bit different. I would rather create a borderless panel for the groupboxes and stack/dock everything like this:
If I resize this window, that will look like this:
Btw, I do not like if buttons are resized like this. I would use only Anchor = Left, Right for them so they would preserve their height. And do not forget to set a proper MinimumSize for the form.
Simplest and cleanest way is use layout panles.
It's hard to code location of controls which depends of previous control's location and size (expect case when you know order of controls).
In WPF everything are on ContentControl which is layout panel. Location of control is calculated automatically.
Another problem might be scaling font or glyph icon in combobox. In WPF this simplest and supported.
Suppose that I have the following form in Designer:
I want to give users the ability to stretch this form as they want and all controls should be located like in the picture, no matter how user changed the size of this form, so they should take the same amount of space and stick to the same controls and borders.
How can I do it in WinForms? I know that there are such things like Docks etc, but I didn't find the correct way to use them in this situation.
You want the Anchor property in this case, not Dock. Anchoring means that a control will always keep the same distance to certain sides (top, left, right, and/or bottom) even if it means that the size must be changed; docking OTOH does not care about margins, it just fills up all available space on one or all sides.
Here's what you might want to do:
Anchor the two image buttons to the top and right.
Anchor the OK button to the right and bottom (I guess).
Anchor the large ListBox to all sides.
Just To Add some notes on good answer of stakx
For Controls Like ListBox that have a limit to their height, setting anchor is not enough and you should set IntegralHeight of them to false.
I reccomend to set MinimumSize of Form to prevent a user from sizing a window to an undesirable size.In your case Set it to a minimum acceptable size to prevent ugly small form with an unusable ListBox.
I'm new to Windows Forms in Visual Studio, and I am wondering how to automaticly resize controls to the window size.
Say, I have 2 controls in a panel, a List Box and a Button. I want the button to dock to the bottom, and I want the List Box to fit the rest of the space. when the window resizes, the button should be at the bottom (as expected with docking), and the list box should stretch down to the button.
Is there a way to do this without any code?
Thanks.
Dock is pretty easy to use, but I recommend using the Anchor properties instead. Resize your form to a reasonable size in the Designer. Then, place your controls to look the way you want. Then, decide which controls should resize with the form and set the Anchor property as follows:
If you want the control to resize with the form in width, set the Right anchor.
If you want to resize height, set the Bottom anchor.
If you want the control to stay right when the form resizes, unset the Left anchor.
If you want the control to stay bottom when the form resizes, unset the Top anchor.
The problem I have with Docks is that they sometimes act funny when controls are not declared in a specific order, and to get the effect you want, sometimes you have to create extraneous panels just to hold controls.
It really gets messy when you want to maintain the aspect ratio of each control. One way, which is not really up to the mark if you want to get into fixing the details, is to use TableLayoutPanel and use Dock and Anchor wisely to achieve what you want.
Use the dock and fill options on the controls. Look under properties for each object, and containers if they are in any.
You can use SplitContainer
Google for examples. Here is one
Try setting your ListBox's Dock property to Fill.
You'll need to watch for one thing though: by default the ListBox will size itself to display whole list items. If you resize the control so that it displays a partial item it will adjust itself so it will display a complete item. This can make the control appear to lose its 'Dock'ing behavior. The solution for this is to set the ListBox's IntegralHeight property to false, which specifies that the control not resize itself to fit complete items.
typically in java if you have a layout manager of somesort, when you resize the page then the components in that panel will resize accordingly. I think my app is missing some sort of layout manager to control resizing as at the moment everything is just static
Is there a way to make it resize on the changing of the form size? say the user makes the page bigger, then the componenets adjust and so on.
Thanks
.NET has layout managers as well.
Personally, I prefer the TableLayoutPanel for my WinForms apps.
Once you layout the Table (using a combination of static/dynamic sized rows/columns) you add your child controls to the table cells. Once you add your controls, you can dock or anchor the controls to the cell so that they are automatically adjusted when the window is re-sized.
Two main options:
Anchoring. Set your control to "anchor" to the sides of your form. This means that if the form resizes, the control will stay a constant distance from that side. So, if you anchor Top, Left and Right, then your control will stay in the same position, but resize horizontally with the width of the form. Play with it. It'll be obvious.
Docking. Set your control to "dock" to a side of the form, or the center. This is usually done with containers, and it will make the widget take up that entire portion of the form no matter how large it gets.
In Windows Forms you make use of the Control.Anchor property, which will cause the control to adjust accordingly when the window resizes.
To do this with windows forms you use the Anchor and Dock properties of the control
See this for a guide on how to use them