Is it possible in WPF to move an ActiveX control to a different place in the visual tree? I have a control that I would like to dynamically move to be the child of another widget.
If this isn't possible is there a way to make a copy of the control and place it somewhere else? My previous attempts at this have not worked at all.
Here is an analogy, it's not a great one, but hopefully it drives the point home:
Imagine you have built a scene up using LEGOs. You also have a flat piece of aluminum with an image on it and you want to insert it under one of your LEGO layers so that it becomes part of the scene. You can't do this because there are no pegs and holes in the aluminum. It wont stick to the bottom layer and the LEGOs on top won't stick.
The analogy breaks down here because in the real world you could use glue or something to make it work.
WPF provides a single window object hosting a single DirectX surface upon which it renders each of its controls (our LEGOs above). ActiveX controls (or Winforms controls) each require a separate system window object (the aluminum plate). It's not possible to place a system window in between elements rendered on a DirectX surface.
The two technologies don't mix (or at least don't intermingle). You either have to live with this fact and arrange things with that limitation, or you need to change technologies. Either build your application with Winforms (where every control is a system window), or create/find a WPF control that provides the same functionality as this ActiveX control you're using.
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So I have experience in C++ and I am now messing around in C# .NET with the Windows Forms. I know how to create a new Form, which I can use as a new window. And that you can also create user control, a component or a normal class.
Now I made an application in C++ but I want to convert it to C# .NET. In C++ I made the whole gui myself. But I want to do that now in C# .NET for practice.
In that application, the user could create nodes (Like you can in unreal engine 4 in the blueprints, see example picture)
Now I am unsure what would be the best way to do this in Windows forms.
Making a new form doesn't seem like the correct way. Because the nodes have to be inside of the main screen. And you should be able to move the grid which hold the nodes. So nodes shouldnt be able to exit the main screen that holds them.
Is it better to create it from scratch myself in a class? Or can I achieve this with a user control or component class? I do not understand what the best use of these classes are and what they are used for.
So I want to make something like this, and the question is what is the best type of class to make the nodes with?:
I think you should use WPF to obtain node-base UI. I developed a program with such an interface in WPF and it was pretty simple (I didn't have any experience in WPF):
You can create almost every layout you want using grids, borders, stackpanels, dockpanels, paths etc.
I have a WPF application that loads a realtime live chart in a window,
But I end up having 10+ windows open on my desktop (as many windows as there are charts).
So my need is basically to group/embed all these WPF windows in a single window.
I tried WPF MDI but I had serious trouble since it requires the windows to be usercontrols instead, and in that case, my live chart displays but stays empty and does not refresh nor plots realtime data. Same behavior when I put my chart controls inside a Page instead of a Window (chart does not update). This is why I guess I really need to stick with windows at this point.
I welcome any simple & straight solution
Are you sure you want to have a last century MDI in your WPF application? I'd recommend to switch to other, less expensive and more flexible content arrangement. I'd organize the charts in some kind of scrollable or swipeable container, maybe with some kind of navigation or tabbing facility... If your users really want to have one or some charts in a separate window(s), let them drag the charts out of the main container and create separate window on demand (something like dragging a tab out of Interent Explorer).
I have to create an animated flow chart GUI which displays different states. Further on demand the flow chart elements are re-positioned and re-sized if the focus shifts to certain elements.
All of this is no problem, with drawing shapes, animations, etc. provided by WPF this is an easy, though by hand and alot of manually is done.
The problem I am facing is, that there will be > 40 of these flow charts.
Is there a template mechanism or generic approach to generalize this task?
Creating a set of user controls is the right way to deal with this problem.
The advantage is, animation and design can be encapsulated into the user control files. This way they don't polute the main application code.
There is a project called Graph# http://graphsharp.codeplex.com/ an there must be similar projects on codeplex.
I am trying to create a panel which will have a set of "buttons" on it.
These buttons should have the following behaviour:
Appear similar to a tag (with
rounded edges)
Contain a red
cross to remove the filter/tag from
the panel, similar to the way internet
explorer tabs have an embedded cross to close the individual tab.
allow the user to click
on the tag and respond like a normal
button (as long as the click is not
in the red cross)
Number 1 is no problem, this is just appearance, however, regarding numbers 2 and 3, I am not sure if there is already code out there do to something similar...and I dont really want to reinvent the wheel if I can avoid it!
My question is: Does anyone know if there is something out there in infragistics which will do this simply, or will I need to write this myself by subclassing winform buttons?
Thanks in advance!
Is this new development or maintenance of an existing project?
If it is maintenance, you have a somewhat tougher time ahead. You'll implement a UserControl, probably segmented into two buttons. Use docking to get the behavior as correct as possible. The far right button would contain your cross image; the left (which would need to auto-expand as you resize the control) would contain your primary button behavior. Play with the visual styles until you get them right (EG, removing borders, etc).
If this is new development, and you haven't gotten too far into it, you might consider using Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) instead of WinForms. It will be easier to build the control and get it to look exactly how you want it. WPF includes an extremely powerful control compositing system which allows you to layer multiple controls on top of each other and have them work exactly as you'd expect, and it carries the added advantage of allowing full visual control out-of-the-box.
Either way, this is more work than dropping in an external component ... I've used Infragistics for years, and I can't think of anything they have which is comparable. The closest, but only if you're building an MDI application and these controls are for window navigation, is the Tabbed MDI window management tools -- and there, only the tabs (which replace window title bars) have this behavior.
I don't think that infragistics can do something like this. The UltraButton control can't.
Implementing a own control wouldn't be that hard.
your probably going to have to make a costume control for this type of work.
I'm writing an application that is basically just a preferences dialog, much like the tree-view preferences dialog that Visual Studio itself uses. The function of the application is simply a pass-through for data from a serial device to a file. It performs many, many transformations on the data before writing it to the file, so the GUI for the application is simply all the settings that dictate what those transformations should be.
What's the best way to go about designing/coding a tree-view preferences dialog? The way I've been going about it is building the main window with a docked tree control on the left. Then I have been creating container controls that correspond to each node of the tree. When a node is selected, the app brings that node's corresponding container control to the front, moves it to the right position, and maximizes it in the main window. This seems really, really clunky while designing it. It basically means I have tons of container controls beyond the edge of the main window during design time that I have to keep scrolling the main window over to in order to work with them. I don't know if this totally makes sense the way I'm writing this, but maybe this visual for what I'm talking about will make more sense:
Basically I have to work with this huge form, with container controls all over the place, and then do a bunch of run-time reformatting to make it all work. This seems like a lot of extra work. Am I doing this in a totally stupid way? Is there some "obvious" easier way of doing this that I'm missing?
A tidier way is to create separate forms for each 'pane' and, in each form constructor, set
this.TopLevel = false;
this.FormBorderStyle = FormBorderStyle.None;
this.Dock = DockStyle.Fill;
That way, each of these forms can be laid out in its own designer, instantiated one or more times at runtime, and added to the empty area like a normal control.
Perhaps the main form could use a SplitContainer with a static TreeView in one panel, and space to add these forms in the other. Once they are added, they could be flipped through using Hide/Show or BringToFront/SendToBack methods.
SeparateForm f = new SeparateForm();
MainFormSplitContainer.Panel2.Controls.Add(f);
f.Show();
Greg Hurlman wrote:
Why not just show/hide the proper container when a node is selected in the grid? Have the containers all sized appropriately in the same spot, and hide all but the default, which would be preselected in the grid on load.
Unfortunately, that's what I'm trying to avoid. I'm looking for an easy way to handle the interface during design time, with minimal reformatting code needed to get it working during run time.
I like Duncan's answer because it means the design of each node's interface can be kept completely separate. This means I don't get overlap on the snapping guidelines and other design time advantages.
I would probably create several panel classes based on a base class inheriting CustomControl. These controls would then have methods like Save/Load and stuff like that. If so I can design each of these panels separately.
I have used a Wizard control that in design mode, handled several pages, so that one could click next in the designer and design all the pages at once through the designer. Though this had several disadvantages when connecting code to the controls, it probably means that you could have a similar setup by building some designer classes. I have never myself written any designer classes in VS, so I can't say how to or if its worth it :-)
I'm a little curious of how you intend to handle the load/save of values to/from the controls? There must be a lot of code in one class if all your pages are in one big Form?
And yet another way would of course be to generate the gui code as each page is requested, using info about what type of settings there are.