I am currently looking for what is best practise when creating a dynamic listview, this will contain a list of clients and once the user clicks this will expand a detailed expander style. I have in the past used user controls, adding a new one each time, however this caused performance issues.
Take a look at this page. This seems to be exactly what you want. Instead of a listview, it uses a datagrid.
Currently we have a WPF application being built in C# using Visual Studio 2010. There is a combo box that has check-boxes in it, but we would like there to be a select/deselect all option. This would be essentially the same as what you see in the auto-filter drop-downs in MS Excel 2007/2010, where you can select all checkboxes or deselect all checkboxes. The combo box is populated from a field in a SQL Compact Database, whose records depend on the value selected in another combo box (so the other combo box acts as a filter for which values you would see in this drop-down).
This feature has been on our plate for months, but the technical team keeps pushing back for the next release because they say it's too difficult to implement. I'm the business analyst on the application, not the actual programmer, but I figured I would come here to elicit some help.
Is this really something that is difficult to achieve (as in, it would take at least a week to implement)? What would be the way to go about achieving this?
Here's a solution from someone on MSDN. I created a new WPF project to try it out... it works. You can check individual checkboxes. If you check or uncheck the Select All option, all other checkboxes are checked or unchecked accordingly. Took about 5 minutes to create and test.
Of course, it may be that your team has overridden the functionality of the control in some way or they'll hit some other limitation and not be able to implement this, but the combobox should support it.
Please forgive any silly words I may say. I am coming from a Actionscript3 background.
I am using "Visual C# 2010 Express".
I have a simple Form, in a WindowsForm Project, which currently holds just a Listbox. (Which I presume I will have to change to something else).
And I made myself a different display object (User Control) that is currently a Checkbox a title. (More will be added once I get over the hurdle below)
But I can't even get as far as Displaying the UserControl as a list.
I can't seem to find anywhere on the listbox to say "User this displayobject as the visual for listbox". I see tutorials saying "ItemsPanelTemplate" but I get error saying there is no such property for a Listbox.
I even tried making the Form in Design view and it is not in the list down the side of the GUI when I dragged as Listbox on screen.
Now I know how I would do this in pure Actionscript, but I dont know how to do this in Pure C#. Tutorials are not helping, as all the Microsoft site seems to try to give me is XAML (XML). and I am looking for C# code. So I have thrown in the towel and pleading for outside help.
Thank you for any help you can give.
It sounds like you want a list of items, each with a CheckBox and some descriptive text. Try using the CheckedListBox control. MSDN link.
This question also answers the question of how to do custom image drawing for each item in a ListBox. It may be helpful.
Edit after clarification:
Try embedding the UserControl in a ListView, rather than a ListBox.
References on embedding controls in ListViews:
C# listview - embedding controls
Adding button into a Listview in WinForms
You could also use a list of Panels, with each Panel hosting a UserControl.
C# List of Panels
But the real answer, as seen in the question's comments, is that Winforms doesn't have a convenient way to do this. This is a task much better suited to WPF.
You may check out freeware component Better ListView Express from ComponentOwl. It supports simple Details view without columns, two and three-state checkboxes, images and more...
They also offers full version with even more nice features like hierarchical and multi-line items.
I downloaded the source code from this tutorial after a failed attempt to make my own Wizard. The control works great and is integrating nicely into my program. I have one minor problem, though. I have a page that has both a databound ListBox and a databound TreeView. When changing to the next or previous page, the TreeView maintains its selections but the ListBox does not. Instead, it appears to update itself (judging by the flash). How can I prevent this from happening and maintain the user's selections?
Thanks,
Joe
Ugh! Serves me right for re-using code that I haven't looked at in a couple of months. Turns out the TreeView is not data bound but populated from a Value Object. I modified the ListBox to use its own VO and now it works perfectly. Kind of a complicated way of doing things but whatever works, right?
I'm building a C# client app that allows a user to communicate with one or more existing users in a system via an email-like metaphor. I'd like to present the user with a text entry box that auto-completes on known email addresses, and allows multiple delimiter-separated addresses to be entered. Ideally, I'd also like the email addresses to turn into structured controls once they've been entered and recognized. Basically, I'm modeling the UI interaction for adding users after Facebook's model.
Are there any Windows Forms controls out there with the ability to do something like this? Is there any well-established terminology for a hybrid textbox / control list box (no, not a ComboBox) or something that I should be searching for?
Thanks,
-Patrick
I have had good luck in the past creating composite user-controls to provide specific functionality using native .NET Winforms controls. It works pretty good as long as there aren't too many of them, in which case things start to slow down.
In you case, and this is just off the top of my head, but, perhaps you could take a FlowLayoutPanel, a Button, and a Textbox which supports auto-complete and put these together to create a control that would provide the functionality you are looking for.
If there are no addresses selected in the control (e.g. in a List<string>), then the container (FlowLayoutPanel) would only display the TextBox. Once the user selected an entry, the control would automatically create a Button with the appropriate caption and insert it to the left in the FlowLayoutPanel. If the user removes an address he/she has already selected, simply remove its representation (the button) from the FlowLayoutPanel, and the TextBox can resize accordingly. There may be issues with getting the TextBox to fill up the remaining space (I can't remember how to do that), but you get the idea. The container does not have to be FlowLayoutPanel - you could use a Panel with Docked controls, or even a TableLayoutPanel for this.
A design as I described would allow the user to delete the address by clicking on the button. However, without some other visual cues, that isn't very intuitive or user-friendly, so I would consider making the "Button" be another composite control which contains a "prettied-up" label along with an tiny delete Button (X) to the right. For this you could use a Panel control and dock the X button to the right, and fill the Label on the left. You would provide public properties here as needed to control the text and provide an event handler or callback for the delete functionality.
Once the visual stuff is working, all that is left is to provide the appropriate Properties and Methods on the main control to allow it to interact as needed with outside code.
As a simple, "poor man's", implementation you could take a look at the AutoComplete* properties of the TextBox control. You could dynamically populate the AutoCompleteSource with your known addresses and when an entry matches, add to a separate, list-style control of your choice.
See this SO article for some interesting code snippets related to your question, and my suggested workaround.
Beyond the built-in AUtoComplete properties you're probably looking at having to purchase a 3rd party control from a tools vendor.
I've not seen anything like that before in WinForms. In WPF it would be another matter - if you can use that, maybe consider hosting a WPF control within your WinForms application instead?
I think you're trying to do something similar to this codeproject article: AutoComplete TextBox
And since you mention WPF in a comment, you also have this article: WPF AutoComplete Folder TextBox (should be easy enough to cut out the folder bit of the article I'd thought).
Well, there isn't such a control. If I were you, I'd create 2 textboxes to do the job. See, a normal textbox can easily be configured for autocomplete from a list, even dynamically; however, it accepts only one entry at a time.
So, I suggest you dedicate one textbox for autocomplete, and one for the addresses. So, whenever there is a qualified email address in the first textbox, and you click enter, the address gets added to the address textbox, and automatically add delimitation.
Then you need to handle the addresses in the address textbox as objects instead of characters. Code it in a way that when a user tries to delete a character in an address, the whole address is deleted.
This is the workaround I can think of. I'll help with the code if you give it a try.