User sortable list control - c#

I need to give to a windows form user (C# 4.0 application) a way to act on a control showing a list containing several items. What is needed is to give to the user a way to select an item and then to move it upside or downside because changing the order. A possible solution is in the following image that shows a possible implementation using a couple of buttons (labeled + and -) to change a sort key value for each element then giving the reorder responsibility to an override of the alphabetical sort provided by a ListBox control. The change must persists until form disposal
I am wondering if there is a better or simpler way to get the same result; maybe there is some control featuring capabilities that I am unaware of. Thanks

There's no builtin control for this. The solution you suggest can easily be implemented using the Remove and Insert methods for the ListBox.Items collection.
Another solution could be to allow the user to drag & drop the items. Look at CodeCaster's link in the comments to your question.

Related

Best way to add "dynamic" controls?

My program will prompt the user for a number, i.e. 25. The program will then start the "main form" with 25 controls (textbox). The 25 (or whatever number) of textboxes (or whatever control) will need to be formatted evenly. I will also need to be able to retrieve the text (or another property if I use another control) in order, from left to right and up to down. What is the best method of approaching this?
Using WPF MVVM. In a .XAML file, create a DataTemplate with the DataType of a ViewModel that will provide the binding for your TextBoxs, lets call this the TextboxViewModel. Then using a ItemsControl element with an ItemsSource of TextboxViewModel. You'll be able to instantiate as many TextBoxs as you want and be able to get the result by browsing through your list of TextboxViewModel.
Supposing you are using Windows Forms here.
Dynamically create the X controls and add them to the Controls collection of your form. To ease the access to them you can store their reference in a List and set some event handlers too, depending on your needs. You just need to calculate their positions while you add them.
If WinForms, this is exactly what the FlowLayoutPanel is for. Just add the controls to it and they will arrange themselves automatically, wrapping down to the next row as needed. As Mihai already suggested, you could also keep reference to those controls in a List.
Another option would be to use a TableLayoutPanel. It's a little more difficult to learn and use, but is much more flexible and powerful.

Dynamically creating Tab+DataGrid for binding with multiple different classes?

I apologize for the crappy title, I wasn't quite sure how to summarize what I'm trying to do.
My scenario:
I am refactoring an existing WinForms application to WPF and MVVM. I'm currently working on a module that provides search functionality for a database comprised of many different tables such as Contact, User, Case, Product, etc. In code-behind there are classes which provide an Object for each. I have written wrapper classes for each of the searchable table Objects that expose only the properties a user would want/need to see in the search results for each type of Object, for binding to a DataGrid.
Once these search results exist, they need to be displayed in a combination of Tab Controls and Data Grids, like so:
Because of some use cases, I need to be able to create an individual display Tab+DataGrid for the results of every single search that is performed. I cannot have a single tab for each type of search that is shown/hidden as needed.
I'm not sure how to proceed from where I currently am to the goal pictured and described above. Thanks for any help anyone can provide.
Not sure I entirely understand your question, but it looks to me that it might be a candidate for datatemplateselector.
Basically, you use an ItemsControl bound to your result collection and then - using a datatemplateselector - you swap in the appropriate template to display the item based upon a code inspection.
That will let you present all the results in a single list.
If you want to display your results in a tabs, I would present a collection of each result type in your viewmodel. So you have a Users collection and a seperate Products collection. Then you can bind individual data grids to each template.
If you want to then hide the tabs when no results are present, add a data trigger using the expression.interactivity namespace to trigger the visibility of each tab page based on its respective collection count.
One more thing, if you want to create tab items dynamically, i.e. One tab for each search - the tab control has an ItemSource property. If you group each search result into an object an expose an observable collection of that object, you can bind that to your tab control and have it create tab items for each search result. Just make that object contain a collection of actual results and you should be able to create a itemscontrol as mentioned here already.
Sorry if this appears a bit of a mind dump, but like I said - not sure if I entirely get the question :)
Rather then chuck a load of code snippets in, there a plenty of samples just a google away if anything sounds helpful.

Change the auto-complete behaviour of a textbox

I have two doubts about the autocomplete feature of textboxes in C#.
First, I want to display the full list, not only the ones that start with the given text, and secondly I want to prevent the auto-complete of specific options (some are category titles).
I've been checking the textbox properties and there's nothing related to it, so probably the main question could be, Is there a way to modify / override the textbox events in order to handle the auto-complete actions? (I don't know if it applies to show the full list too)
I assume you're asking about a winforms textbox, as I dont think the WPF textbox supports autocomplete at all.
The base TextBox class will not support doing what you want, so you could in theory attempt to override all of the functionality in the TextBox class to do what you want, but the better idea would be to create a new custom control that inherits from TextBoxBase and implement the autocomplete behavior the way you want it.
I'm not sure about displaying the full list (perhaps a combobox or similar is more suited to this?) but you can definitely do something like this to swap which list of possible items can be displayed.
Another option, though one I like less, is to remove items you don't want to display at a given time from the collection dynamically, like this: textBox.AutoCompleteCustomSource.Remove("ACategoryTitle")
I could foresee that approach having many problems with trying to rebuild the list constantly. I would probably create a subclass of AutoCompleteStringCollection that wraps some LINQ code to nicely select the union of some lists and not others to display in the textbox.
I decided to build my own autocomplete tool with the help of a simple listbox and events, then I could achieve what I was expecting..
The CodingGorilla's answer probably leads to a better solution if you want something more decent, in my case for speed reasons I decided to do it that way but I'll mark his answer as the accepted in order to help other people who have the same doubt and they could consider that point..

ordered list of user controls (with addition and deletion)

Some context
I am creating an application which allows users create basic shelving arrangements, I wish to create an interface which represents shelving blocks(one set of shelves) next to each other in order (left to right) and allows users to edit their details.
Each block will have a series of details such as its order,a name, a width, a height and a number of shelves.
Requirements
I want the interface to have a horizontal scrolling list of (max 20) user controls. Each user control will represent the details of a block, with a basic form for these details to be edited.
The user should be able to press a button in the user control which deletes it and reorders the other blocks and also add blocks to the end of the list.
My Question
How do I maintain an ordered list of these 'shelf block' user controls, and have the form handle the pressing of the deletion button in any of the controls which causes it to be deleted and the list to be reordered? Any help would be great.
Screenshot
I am just starting to program the interface so I can only provide a quick mock up of what I want the interface to look like:
as basic as it is I hope it gives you some idea of what I'm looking for.
You can use a BindingList to store your blocks. A BindingList will notify the UI control (e.g. a ListBox) that data has been changed such as a block being deleted. The UI will then reflect this by removing the block from the ListBox. If you're familiar with WPF/Silverlight databinding this is similar to, but not quite the same as, an ObservableCollection list (if you're targetting .NET 4, I believe you may be able to use ObserverableCollections in a WinForm without much trouble but someone else may be able to clarify that).
Alternatively, you can use a BindingSource instead of directly using a BindingList.
How about putting a hidden grid control on your form.
Then you just add/ remove rows to the grid with the desired data
and everything is kept very orderly. One advantage here is that
for debugging purposes you can always make the grid visible to see
all the data quickly.

Custom items in ListView control

I need to add a custom item to ListView control (like on the picture), is it possible ? And if it is, what's the best way to do it ?
I don't know that this is possible with Winforms. The list items in a System.Windows.Forms.ListView are System.Windows.Forms.ListViewItem objects contained in a strongly typed collection.
You could try to create a subclass of ListViewItem, but since that class inherits directly from System.Object and is not an actual windows form control, you might be borrowing trouble, as you would need to replicate all the functionality of the inheritance chain of an actual control.
Now, if you are not too far in to the project, you might consider looking at switching to WPF. The ListView in WPF uses controls as items, so you could easily create a usercontrol that you would use as your list items.
You might be able to find a control library with a control that gives you the functionality you want, but for the most part, the good libraries are commercial and can be prohibitively expensive for small shops and individual .
I did a quick google search for any library that offers this capability, but I could not find one that displayed custom controls.
Not sure if this is what you're after, but ListViewItems have a Tag property that can store custom data about each item.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.listviewitem.tag.aspx
How about creating a user control. In that case you can set your user controls at the top and listview below. Or are you trying to add these controls as items in the listview itself?

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