I'm trying to write a simple GUI that renders a number of images using the Graphics' object primitives. What I want to have is a series of areas that I can paint to in isolation of the other areas, so that each painting "canvas" has it's own origin within the global coordinate frame of the top-level form.
So far I have tried adding several panels to a FlowLayoutPanel. However, they seem to be getting placed one on top of the other, as only one onPaint method is being called. I can override the Form's onPaint to invalidate the other panels, which are then painted, but not displayed.
Besides setting the sizes, and initialising the FlowLayoutPanel, is there something I'm missing? Is there a better way of doing this?
Code: http://pastebin.com/30Uf9AGF
based on the names of your classes, it looks like you are designing a game ... maybe you want to take a look at Microsofts XNA framework?
however, the problem with the code you provided is, your layoutPanel is not sized correctly, therefore its child-controls are not visible on the main form... since painting is only done for visible items ... there is no painting for most of your FloorDrawPanels ...
try changing the size of your layoutPanel or setting its dock mode to fill
You don't set the size of the FlowLayoutPanel. It will default to 200 x 100 with a Margin of 3. You fill it with controls that are 100 x 100. Given the margin, only one of those controls can ever be visible at the same time. It is therefore no surprise that you only ever get one paint event, Windows only asks visible controls to paint themselves.
Not quite sure what was intended, start by making the FLP bigger. And set its AutoScroll property to true so that the user can scroll the other controls into view. Using the designer would have been a quick way to find this out btw.
Related
Imagine a bar graph with horizontal bars that may be very wide. I have a Panel on a Form where I want to display these bars and scroll and zoom them. The Form, and thus the Panel, can be resized. The bars are dynamically created from a database. Each time the user zooms in or out, all bars have to be created anew to adjust their sizes on the Panel.
I use Label controls to create these bars, but the problem applies to all other controls as well: If I zoom in far enough, my bars will eventually exceed the magic 16 bit border of control sizes (>65536 pixels). This makes it impossible to simply create all the controls on the panel at start and let the panel handle the scrolling.
My idea: Clear the Panel of all bar controls and create only the ones that are visible in the current view window, according to the current position of the scroll bars and the zoom level. The bars exceeding far from the visible view will be cut short just outside the Panel, so their maximum size is limited by the Panel size.
My questions:
At which Panel event(s) should this clear/create process take place best?
There could be thousands of controls, so it should be as seldom as possible.
Is there a better way to handle this? Maybe I got it all wrong from the start.
This problem arises not only with huge controls but also when smaller controls are very far apart (>65536 pixels) on a Panel, so I think a good solution may be helpful for many projects.
I wouldn't like to have to create / destroy controls, or hide / resize controls just for their click events. It's quite easy to create a UserControl and override the OnPaint method to draw the bars, and override the OnClick or OnMouseXxx events.
Since you already know the positions of the bars in "virtual space", it's easy to map the location of the mouse cursor to a bar (or a click outside a bar).
I know you said winforms is Mandatory, but I really think you should look into the wpf viewbox. You can host a wpf element in winforms. So everything else can be forms related, and you have a panel that hosts and displays your controls. I could write up a quick example that might demonstrate this for you, but if you have no intent of going this way I really don't want to waste my time.
You could create a metafile (vector graphics), show that in an image control, and manually determine which logical element is clicked.
So, I've been asked to redesign an old application I wrote a few years ago.
Basically, nothing much needs to be changed, except that the Customer wants it to be more fluid, and that it must be fullscreen (no visible "window") I.e. no Titlebar, just a Borderless fullscreen Window.
What is the best way to make sure everything stays fluid, I mean how can we make sure everything appears where it should, 'cause you know, different resolutions, monitor sizes etc?
This is easy in web pages/css, but this is not something I've done before. Most of the Controls will be created programatically at runtime, based on what action was performed, etc. How would I accomplish such a layout? Basically I want to be able to lay it all out full screen, without knowing how large their monitor is, or what resolution they're using.
Your certainly correct in trying to design your form using a fluid layout that responds to the size of the available space and size of the form font. To do that you want to use the following controls and control properties.
1, TableLayoutPanel will split an area into a set of rows and columns and allow you to position your child controls within individual cells of that table layout. This responds to a change in the form width and height.
2, FlowLayoutPanel will position your child controls from left to right and automatically move to a new row when you run out of space. This is great for a fluid design as it will adjust the layout depending on the available space.
3, Control.Anchor property allows a child control to alter position and size based on the size of the form client area. So you make your control always be a fixed offset from the right or bottom edges.
4, Control.Dock property will position a child control against an edge and the opposite size will automatically be defined by the containing form.
You could put Your controls into tableLayout, and set the Dock property to fill.
This sounds simple to me but I'm not sure if there's a best/suggested way to do it.
I'd like my UI to have a panel docked along the top, split into two panels, left and right, that always share the width of the parent equally. There'll be a minimum overall width so nothing gets squashed, but on resizing I'd like the two panels' widths to always be equal.
I thought of using a split container control but it doesn't do what I want in this case as I can't disable manual resizing.
My current idea is just to override the onResize method (forgot the exact name), and just manually set the two widths to parent.width/2, but it seems a bit roundabout, and potentially slow if it's calling onResize for every pixel's worth of movement.
Is there a better way to do this, or a control/layout that handles this for me?
Disclaimer: I'm using an older version of DevExpress, 10.1.4. It's not my decision and I don't think I can get the team to upgrade at the moment. Using C# on .Net platform 3.5.
I would drop a couple of panels onto the form and set their Size within the form's ResizeEnd event handler. This looks to be the best solution from my point of view.
You can use the XtraLayoutControl to achieve this, but that might be overkill.
Otherwise, you'd have to do it manually.
I have a TableLayoutPanel that has several TableLayoutPanels inside it. The amount changes dynamically and will almost always be too many to be able to fit inside the form.I need it to have a scroll bar so I can view the entire component.
I have tried setting the autoscroll property on the main panel to true and docking it and/or setting a maximum size. What the controler does instead, is to try and fit ALL of the Panel inside the form therefore changing the size of its inside components and squeezing them all together instead of creating a scroll bar to scroll through my Panel.
Do you guys know what I might be doing wrong?
Thanks.
Jose
PS: I am using VS 2010
I had the same issue one day and found out that the problem was that I had a "MinimumSize" set to the TableLayoutPanel. That caused the control to keep a minimum height no matter what the Dock and/or Anchor constraints, preventing the AutoScroll feature to work properly. Since that feature is based on a simple check on the Y coordinates of all children controls of a control against that control's height, the scrollbar was not appearing despite the fact the the TableLayoutPanel's child controls were "disapearing" out of sight due to its parent control clip area.
So in other words, check the MinimumSize property of TableLayoutPanel and make sure it's empty.
Maybe this will help.
if it still doesn't work, try put a panel and then put the tableLayoutPanel into that panel. Set to true the autoScroll property of the panel.
I had the same thing happen on my project. All my controls were squished inside the TableLayoutPanel. In my case, I was rendering many of the controls as ColumnStyle.Percent. Switching this to ColumnStyle.Autosize was the fix I needed.
I assume you've set these properties as well, but just in case my TableLayoutPanels also use the following settings:
AutoSize = true;
AutoSizeMode = AutoSizeMode.GrowAndShrink;
AutoScroll = true;
Late answer, but I've been fighting with a complex layout recently and was looking for a solution to get my scrolling working on a screen with far too many fields. Honestly, better design should avoid this problem 99% of the time but sometimes your hands are just tied.
The Problem
The problem seems to be that if you're nested too deeply with multiple grids, groups, and panels they stop reporting properly to parent controls that their contents have overflown the size of the current screen. Actually, the problem is probably that the controls are all set to dock fill and do fit within their parent control, so the top level control doesn't know that the contents of its great-great-great-great-grandchild controls don't fit.
Solution
The trick to fix this seems to be manually forcing the top most panel to scroll at a certain minimum size:
MainPanel.AutoSize = true;
MainPanel.AutoScrollMinSize = new Size(400, 500);
TableLayoutPanel scrolling is full of bugs.
The solution to make it work correctly is here.
The closest I can think of using is the GroupBox control which has a custom drawing at the top identifying the panel.
Is it doable? I have done independent custom controls like buttons, sliders, color pickers, but not totally sure if this sort of drawing can be done on a GroupBox?
I would need the grouping of a GroupBox or a TabPanel.
Are there any alternatives on the net that I can use?
Just exploring the alternatives before I start doing it.
A technique we used was to create multiple panels docked to the top of a frame and set their height to zero. Then when we wanted to display a panel we set its height correctly. Winforms automatically reflows other panels to accommodate the new one.
You can also create a recurring timer to trigger every few hundred milliseconds that increases the panel's height by a few pixels until it reaches full size. This creates a nice animation of the panel expanding into place.
See how others have done this. Code Project's got a bunch. Try searching there.
I used this one a while ago and liked it:
Windows XP style Collapsible Panel Bar
Why not just create a composite control? Something to the effect of.. 2 panels or a label and a panel or whatever suits your needs. Drawing it wouldn't be all that difficult but seems overly complicated for your desired functionality. Am I completely missing the mark?