Dynamically creating textbox and setting its location by pixel - c#

In a WPF application, I'd like to create a textbox dynamically which will show in front of the application and be able to freely set its location by pixel. (The textbox is going to follow the mouse cursor).
This was easily done in Winforms on the fly but WPF makes things.. a little bit weird when it comes to setting a control's location by pixel since I have to add the control as a child of a container. I'm aware this is certainly doable on Canvas, but what I actually have is a dockpanel with a richtextbox to the left and a datagrid to the right.
So what are my options here? Do I have to use canvas? Can I get away with using dockpanel (or grid) to implement what I want here?

You can use a Canvas or a Grid. If you use a Canvas, set the Canvas.Left property and the Canvas.Top property. If you use a Grid, you'll need to set a size for your TextBox, set the HorizontalAlignment to Left, and VerticalAlignment to Top. To change the location of the TextBox, assign it values for MarginLeft and MarginTop.

Related

How to prevent WinForm controls to get stretched and maintain a fixed size

I'm working on a .NET 3.5 desktop application written in C#. It's complex UI is populated dynamically. One part of it is the following group box which is contained in a FlowLayoutPanel and the FlowLayoutPanel is contained in a UserControl. The screenshot is taken from the design view:
When I launch the application, all controls get stretched:
Even I'm fixing the widths of each UserControl's size when Load event of the UserControl is called. The AutoSize property of all of the controls inside the group box is false.
Why is this happening and how to prevent this? I want the UI look exactly like the design view.
EDIT
The best answer to this question didn't solve my problem. Firstly, setting the border style to FixedX creates an undesirable border. Secondly, the inner controls still expanded and they are clipped by the border.
Make AutoScaleMode "Inherit" for all children user control.
You can play in the Anchor property
If you want to keep the Label in its place as the design => use combination : Top, Left
If you want to stretch the control horizontally => use combination : Top, Left , Right
If you want to keep the control to stretch the control in all directions => use combination : Top, Left, Right, Bottom
If you want to keep the control in the Bottom right position ( usually used for buttons) => use combination: Bottom, Right
You might read more about Anchor here and here
Hope this will help you
Set the WrapContents property of your FlowLayoutPanel to true
Please notify my if this worked or not
Check EnableVisualStyles property value set at application level. Set it to true and check.
If your button gets wider when you enlarge its container object, the button must be surely anchored to the left and right borders of the container. Just anchor it to the top or bottom, but not to the left or right borders.
Conversely, if your button gets higher, don't anchor it to the top or bottom.

WPF: How to find space available for Canvas?

I'm using WPF shapes to create Hexagons (for a game map) on a Canvas. After some playing around with ScrollViewer, I've decided to implement the scrolling and zoom of the map myself rather than using WPF functionality, just using WPF to get the events for mouse wheel, arrow keys etc. I'm placing the (Hex Map) Canvas as the last child inside a Dock Panel so it will get all the available remaining space. The Dock Panel will be set to be the content of the Main Window. But I want to find out how big the Canvas can be before I put any Children on the Canvas so that I can centre the screen over the Hex I want and only add the Shapes (Hexs) that can actually be seen. When zoomed out, a long way I will remove Polygons altogether and use another method of rendering and when zoomed in a long way I will add more details.
Is there any neat way of getting the available space? The only way that I can think of that will hopefully work is to get the current dimensions of the windows and subtract the dimensions of the outer elements of the Dock Panel, but that feels rather messy.
You may use the ActualWidth and ActualHeight properties of Canvas to determine size available to it. Be sure that HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment are set to Stretch.

How do I make multiple controls in a Windows Form automatically resize with the window?

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.

How to get the Width/Height of a collapsed control in WPF?

im wondering if theres an easy way to get the width of a control in WPF at runtime while the control is collapsed.
when i use control.Width ill get the following result: -1.#IND
and control.actualWidth will return 0.0 because its collapsed.
i want to resize my window and then display the collapsed control.
thanks
Edit:
Some details
i have a grid with 2 columns in my window, the 1st column holds a tab control, the 2nd column holds an expander control. i want to extend the width of my window when expanding the expander control, so the content in the 1st column will remain its size.
Put the control in question inside a container (like a ContentControl) and collapse the container rather than the control itself. Then you should be able to simply call Measure (or use the DesiredSize property) on the control to determine how much room it wants.
What size do you expect to get?
The size is not just dependent on the control but also on its container. So the actual size can not be determined unless the control is actually rendered.
Instead of using Collapsed you could make it Invisible that way it will be sized by its own logic and the logic of the container.
EDIT
In the comments it became clear that what the reason was for needing the size of the control:
I have a grid with 2 columns in my
window, the 1st column holds a tab
control, the 2nd column a holds an
expander control. i want to extend the
width of my window when expanding the
expander control, so the content in
the 1st column will remain its size.
My answer:
Set the SizeToContent of the window to WidthAndHeight and set the width of both grid columns to auto. That should take care of it.
I believe you're going about this the wrong way. You can set the Window Width and height to "Auto" and then it will take care of all the resizing stuff.
The problem arises whenever you directly set the Width property of any control(trust me I've done it). Once you do that, you've told WPF hands off of resizing logic, I know what I'm doing.
If you think something isn't resizing at the right time you can add a handler to some event and then call control.InvalidateVisual() or control.InvalidateMeasurement() which will make it go through a whole new layout pass.
You have to call the UpdateLayout method on the control or conainer of control. After that the things may work properly.
In UWP you can determine size of collapsed control by making it visible for a sec and then hiding it again, change is not noticeable:
var oldVisibility = myBorder.Visibility;
myBorder.Visibility = Visibility.Visible;
myBorder.UpdateLayout();
var height = myBorder.RenderSize.Height;
myBorder.Visibility = oldVisibility;
Post which is marked as an answer actually does not answer the question, it just gives a workaround.
To get the size of the collapsed control you need:
Set control's visibility as Hidden (Collapsed won't evaluate).
Call Measure(new Size(Double.PositiveInfinity, Double.PositiveInfinity)) method of the control.
Get the size from DesiredSize property of the control.
Then you can Collapse your control back.

My own tableheader?

I want to make a table header:
The steps I have taken
Made a user control
Placed a TableLayoutPanel on it(this is basically a grid layout?)
Added and removed the number of columns/rows I wanted
Placed a label in each cell
For each label set its dock to fill and borderstyle to fixedsingle
However the borders are not lined up against each other but instead there is a gab, that makes the whole thing look very ugly.
The border size is also very small, how can I make it bigger?
You can remove the gaps by changing the lable margin property to 0,0,0,0 but the borders will double up in thickness where they meet (Leaving the outer border thinner)
You can disable the borders on the individual labels and use the TableLayoutPanel CellBorderStyle property to get a consistent look with several options for line styles but this will affect all cells, not just the header.
If the TabelLayoutPanel is a fixed size perhaps a background image?
I have no idea how to make the borders thicker in winforms, This is where WPF rules but beats you over the head for using it.
Mike

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