I have a SplitContainer on my form that has its Dock property set to Fill. It contains several child controls, many of which have event handlers attached to them. Later I decide to put a StatusStrip at the bottom of my form. Guess what, I can't set the StatusStrip to dock to the bottom of my form. The SplitContainer will continue to Fill the entire form. Even though the StatusStrip apparently gets docked to the bottom, it actually hides the bottom part of the SplitContainer behind it.
The only around it is to CUT the SplitContainer and then PASTE it back. Cutting the SplitContainer makes the StatusStrip the only control on my form and thus lets it capture the bottom docking. Afterwards, pasting the SplitContainer allows it to fill the remaining area. In short, docking uses First Come, First Serve method.
Now since my controls have lots of event handlers attached to them, cutting and pasting becomes a nightmare for me. Having my project in C# means I have to attach all those event handlers manually.
Is there a better work around?
This is a z-order issue between the splitter and the statusstrip. When you have a control you want to dock fill and one or more controls you want to dock top, left, right, or bottom, you have to have the fill control be the first in the z-order.
The better way is to open the Document Outline tool, select the SplitContainer and use the up or down buttons to change its z-order.
I should add that in Winforms the z-order is specified by the order in which you add controls to the Controls collection. That order determines the order the associated system controls are created, hence their z-order. Using the Document Outline tool to alter z-order simply causes the generated code to be re-ordered.
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How do I make the widths and lengths of an object automatically resize?
What I mean by this is that I'm trying to make my design responsive. The problem is that when a user resizes my app, the objects don't fill the empty spaces that are created (E.g, a box has the same problem).. I'm using Visual Studio and I'm not sure if this is a property or a programming issue..
In winforms, controls have a property Dock. You can set it to Left, Right, Top, Bottom or Fill. If you set the Dock property for the various controls in your form, they will fill the available space whenever your form is resized.
Usually, the "main" control on your form will have a docking style of Fill, while the main menu toolbar will have Top, the status bar will have Bottom and so on. Play around with the Dock property until you get your form organized right.
You may also have controls that must keep a fixed size when their parent form is resized, but must align to one of the edges of the form. For this purpose, controls also have an Anchor property. Set it to Left, Right, Top or Bottom.
I created 2 empty labels, using winforms, to cover some groupboxes
They were created exactly the same way, but they dont behave the same way
The first one:
The second one:
The first covers everything, the second one only covers one groupbox, and displays the other two.
I tried the right click+ send to back /send to front, but I believe this doesn't mean anything in the code, it only purpose is to allow you to visualize better what you are placing in your form, I guess.
Can someone shed some light?
Groubox, Panel, TabPage etc are containers in which we keep controls. Form itself is also a container..
When you drag a label or any other control to place in a form, and if you want to hide the other controls, you should place the label in the form itself and the label should not become child of any of the groupBoxes.
For that the left top corner of the label you drag should not go inside any of the groupBoxes. This is only when you drag. If you want to position at a point inside groupBox, then Drag the control outside the groupBox and then use keyboard arrows to position, this will not let the control to become child of the groupBox. You can also set position on property window.
I have a WinForms application which has two panels which individually contain a usercontrol component (one in each panel). How ever, because both panels are the same size and in the same location, the top most panel becomes a child of the other panel. I want to be able to hide one panel and then show the other panel:
this.panel1.visibile = false;
this.panel2.visibile = true;
But when I hide panel1, the second panel is hidden as well.
How can I make panel2 a non-child of panel1?
I like to keep things simple because I'm new to C# Programming.
This is a common accident in the designer. Dropping the second panel on top of the first one will make it a child of the first panel. Two basic strategies to fix this:
View + Other Windows + Document Outline. Click the second panel in the list and drag it to the form. You'll need to fix up the Location property by hand by typing its value in the Property window.
Keep the upper left corner of the second panel just a bit to the left or top of the first panel. Put it in the right place in the form's constructor by assigning its Location property after the InitializeComponent() call.
Check this answer for a control that works well at design time and lets you easily flip panels at runtime.
The designer will do this automatically because it assumes that when you drag one control over another, you want to make it a child of that control.
What I usually do to get around this is to create the control in a different place on the form, and then use the properties to manually match the positions of sizes of the two controls.
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.
I am working on a largish C# project with a lot of Windows Forms forms that, even though you can resize the form, the elements in the form don't scale.
How can I make the form elements (such as the datagridview, text area's, etc.) scale when the user changes the size of the form?
Nearly all the forms subclass from one specific form, so if there's something I can do in the base class, that'd be great.
You should set the Anchor and Dock properties on the controls in the forms.
The Anchor property controls which edges of a control are "bound" or "tied" to the corresponding edges of its form.
For example, if you set Anchor to Bottom, the distance between the control's bottom edge and the bottom of its parent will not change, so the control will move down as you resize the form.
If you set Anchor to Top | Bottom, the control will resize vertically as you resize the form.
To make a control resize with the form, set the Anchor to all four sides, or set Dock to Fill.
Use the Anchor and Dock properties.
Anchor allows you to pin specific sides of the control to the sides of the parent control.
Dock will bind the whole control to a side of the parent control or it can be set to fill the contents of the parent control.
You usually just need to set the Anchor to the bottom and right of the parent control but gets more difficult when you have controls side by side, then you need to manually resize the controls on the forms OnResize event to get them to scale naturally together.