How do you get the REAL position of objects in silverlight? - c#

How do you get the REAL position of objects in silverlight?
I have a header image centered on the screen. When I make the browser window smaller, obviously, the header's left side goes off the screen. Finding out the actual position is good to know if you want to position objects on top of the image.
I capture the Content_Resized and I run a little test:
if (App.Current.Host.Content.ActualWidth > header.Width)
{
TEST = Canvas.GetLeft(header);
}
else
{
TEST = Canvas.GetLeft(header);
}
TEST always returns zero.
EDIT: header sits on a grid instead of a canvas. "Well, there is your problem..." So a better question might be this. How would I get the margins of an image sitting on a grid?

I probably should just answer the question but how to find the position of an element relative to another is probably something that has been answered before (by myself and others) here and elsewhere on the tinternet.
However if your goal is to place an item over an image then place the image in a Grid and then add the item as child of the Grid. That way you assign the relative position over the image as the margin of the item and let Silverlight's layout system do the rest.
As a general rule if you feel that you need to write code to move stuff about when the size of things change then unless you are writing a custom panel or something you're probably not using Silverlight layout system properly.
Edit:
Try this experiment:-
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
<Grid x:Name="headerContainer" Margin="50, 60, 0, 0" HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top">
<Image Source="YourLargeImage" />
<Image Source="YourSmallerImage" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Top" />
</Grid>
</Grid>
Now try changing the inner grid's Margin to move its position around the screen. Note the smaller image always remains at the top center of the large image.

I got it working.
First of all, these images are on a grid, not a canvas. But switching the grid to a canvas caused lots of other problems one of which is that I could not have the header image centered like before.
The solution was to change the margin of the smaller image sitting on top of the larger header image when the content resized like this:
blankbarimage.Margin = new Thickness((App.Current.Host.Content.ActualWidth - header.Width) / 2, 0, 0, 0);
and, by the way, you create a content resized method like this:
App.Current.Host.Content.Resized += new EventHandler(Content_Resized);
So, to answer my own question, the way you get the REAL position of object in silverlight is (if they are on a grid) by looking at their margin settings.

Related

C# WPF element position not in correct place

I'm developing a vision processing application using WPF and EmguCV 3.0. My issue is that the element isn't positioned correctly on-screen. I have viewed what the padding is, and it returns all sides as 0. The ImageBox element from Emgu, which is what I am using to display the images, is encapsulated in a Windows Forms Host control. I have two other ImageBox elements, which display properly. Each of the ImageBox elements are within their own tab in a TabControl. On startup, I set the width and height properties of all the ImageBoxes and their canvases.
An additional thing to note is that the other two ImageBoxes also overflow out of their boundaries, but are reset back into the boundaries after switching back and forth between the tabs. This only happens once.
Here is a link to screenshots of what the UI looks like. http://imgur.com/a/RwG17
Additionally, here is the XAML and C# code for the ImageBoxes.
<TabItem x:Name="ImageTabControlHSV">
<TabItem.Header>
<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
<TextBlock Text="HSV" />
</StackPanel>
</TabItem.Header>
<Canvas x:Name="HSVImageCanvas">
<WindowsFormsHost>
<emui:ImageBox x:Name="HSVImageBox"/>
</WindowsFormsHost>
</Canvas>
</TabItem>
//Width and height properties are gotten from camera image.
HSVImageBox.Width = ratioWidth;
HSVImageBox.Height = ratioHeight;
HSVImageCanvas.Width = width;
HSVImageCanvas.Height = height;
HSVImageCanvas.MaxHeight = height;
HSVImageCanvas.MaxWidth = width;
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
UPDATE: Putting a counter for how many times the problematic ImageBox has been selected and using Canvas.SetTop() and Canvas.SetLeft() seems to be a workaround. I would still like to know why the canvas is changing its position.
You might try performing a Canvas.SetTop(HSVImageCanvas, HSVImageCanvas.Top) and Canvas.SetLeft(HSVImageCanvas, HSVImageCanvas.Left).
Doug

Image not displayed correctly when moved

I have an image <Image x:Name="image" Source="fingerprint.png" Height="1000"/>.
The image is higher than the form, so it doesn't fit in it completely.
When I move the image by image.Margin = new Thickness(0, image.Margin.Top - 50, 0, image.Margin.Bottom + 50);, the part of the image that wasn't visible before is still not visible, although it's now in the form (see red arrow).
Putting the image in a canvas solved the problem.
The Margin of the image will only control how close to the edges of the parent control your image is allowed to be.
I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve, but if you want the bottom of your image to be visible you need to either change its Position or scale it to fit inside the parent control.
Check this http://www.wpftutorial.net/LayoutProperties.html link to see some visualizations of layouting in WPF.
http://wpf.2000things.com/2011/04/14/276-change-image-sizing-using-the-stretch-property/ has some explanations about how to scale an image.

How to programatically change image color?

I have a method that is triggered every time a user performs an action, within this method I want to trigger the color of an image to change color/illuminate every time the method is called.
Is there a simple way to change the color an image programmatically? I can't see any obvious methods or properties to do this attached to the image.
So the method below is as follow just not sure how to set the image color for BoxBagImage
void matcher_GestureMatch(Gesture gesture)
{
lblGestureMatch.Content = gesture.Name;
scoreCntr++;
boxBagImage. // <-- don't see any color or background property belonging to the image
lblScoreCntr.Content = scoreCntr;
}
What would setting it do? How WPF should guess what "background" you have in mind? There's couple of things that could be called 'background'. Also, how would WPF guess how large area you consider to be the background?
Let's start with the fact that Image displays a bitmap (or such) all over its area, so direct Foreground or Background are rather meaningless here. They would be overdrawn by the bitmap immediately. It's not like TextBox or Canvas.
That's probably why Image does not have such property.
--
If your bitmap itself has a "background" (ie. a drawing of a Tree on a blue sky, sky=background), it is still the content of the bitmap. WPF is not an image-editing program and will not change it for you easily. If you want to change the "background" withing your image, you can load the bitmap, modify its pixels, and load the modified bitmap into Image control. Or apply some smart filter (so-called "effect") at rendering stage.
Or, if your bitmap is transparent (for example, PNG with alpha channel, a Tree on a completely-alphaized-transparent pixels), and you want the "some background" to be seen through that "transparent gaps", then you have to set the background of not the image itself, but the component that the image lies on. So, if you have for example:
<Grid> <Image Source=.... /> </Grid>
then apply the Background on the Grid. Transparent-Image placed on a Blue-Grid will look as if were on blue background, just like drawing on a glass placed on blue table. In fact, the Grid here simply forms the background. You can get any layout or effect in that way. If you dont want to have whole grid in that color, you can inject another grid:
<Grid>
<Grid Background="Blue" Margins="30,30,30,30"> <Image Source=.... /> </Grid>
</Grid>
or whatever you like.
Or, if you meant the "background" of the Image control that shows up when the Image has its Stretch property set in a such way, that the bitmap does not fill the whole area (Stretch=Uniform likes to do that unless you carefully set Width/Height) - then simply look above. The "area" is simply transparent, so just add some color to the component beneath Image.

Drawing a fading grid in WPF

I'm trying to draw a graph-paper like grid as the background of a Canvas. This grid is different from most explanations of how to do this that I've found because the canvas can be scaled to implement zooming. What I want to do is have a series of scales of grid lines, i.e. at every 10^n units. Then, the grid lines should fade out as they become close together due to zooming. In other words if n is large, the lines associated with that grid should be darker/heavier weight than those for a smaller n.
This was easy to do in WinForms, I implemented it by overriding OnPaint and defining the color of the line to be a function of the distance to the next grid line. Lines far apart were given a heavier weight than lines close together.
I have not figured out how to do this in WPF. I can sort of get this behavior by creating a line that has a StrokeThickness according to the spacing of the grid lines, but this only works for a small range of StrokeThickness and scaling values. It would work if it were possible to define a line as having a very heavy weight, but still a small StrokeThickness.
Even doing this via implementing a custom control with OnRender is difficult because I have not found a reliable way to get the scale of the control while rendering it (the ScaleTransform is part of one of the parent controls, not the immediate parent).
Any thoughts on how to accomplish this goal would be much appreciated!
I solved this by NOT adding the grid to the canvas but by stacking the canvas on top of another control that contains the grid:
<Grid>
<Canvas x:Name="GridLayer"/>
<Canvas x:Name="DrawingLayer" />
</Grid>
When zooming events occur I simply redraw the GridLayer.
This allowed me to only draw the lines that are needed, to draw them exactly how I want them and, in my case very important because I had potentially a gazillion grid lines, I did not need to draw the lines any longer/taller than needed. This way I conserved a lot of CPU time.
Another thing to note is that I implemented my own zoom code. I did not use a RenderTransform or a ViewBox because I wanted the line to stay at the same width. All I did was keep track of the coordinates of the top left corner to support panning and the zoomlevel. As soon as one of these changes I redraw the canvases. I wrote two functions: one transforms a coordinate on the Canvas to a graph coordinate and the other one does the reverse. The first method allows me to translate cursor coordinates to graph coordinates and the second one will turn the coordinates of the graph into points that can be used to draw on the canvas.
Untested code and making a lot of assumptions about the orientation of axis:
Point Graph2Canvas(Point graphPoint)
{
var canvasPoint = new Point(graphPoint);
canvasPoint.X *= zoomLevel;
canvasPoint.Y *= zoomLevel;
canvasPoint.X -= topLeft.X;
canvasPoint.Y -= topLeft.Y;
return canvasPoint;
}
This can be optimized and the truth is I created more functions that do the same thing for collections of points.
Extra:
I ended up with a far more complex setup that looked a bit like this:
<Grid>
<Canvas x:Name="BackgroundLayer"/>
<Canvas x:Name="GridLayer"/>
<Canvas x:Name="AxisLayer"/>
<Canvas x:Name="DrawingLayer" />
<Canvas x:Name="SelectionBoxLayer"/>
<Canvas x:Name="CursorLayer"/>
</Grid>

Binding to X Y coordinates of element on WPF Canvas

I have a Canvas with 2 "dots" drawn on it. See this (simplified) code:
<Canvas>
<Ellipse />
<Ellipse />
<Canvas.RenderTransform>
<RotateTransform x:Name="rotateEllipse" />
</Canvas.RenderTransform>
</Canvas>
As you can see, I want to rotate the canvas using the given RotateTransform.
Next, I want to put a TextBlock near to each Ellipse (a label). However, I don't want to include this TextBlock into the Canvas because it will then rotate also. I want the text to remain horizontal.
Any idea how to solve this in an elegant way?
Something like this, should work for you
<TextBlock RenderTransform="{Binding RelativeSource={RelativeSource AncestorType=Canvas},
Path=RenderTransform.Inverse}"/>
Assign to text box transformation matrix an inverse of the transformation matrix of the Canvas.
Good question! And I'm going to guess, so please take this answer with a pinch of salt.
I believe you are trying to place text annotations next to ellipses on a rotated canvas, but these annotations need to remain horizontal. Two things you could try:
Firstly, given the XY point that you know of each ellipse from Canvas.GetTop/GetLeft, you could find its new rotated XY location by applying the RotateTransform to the ellipse location, using the formula U = M*V, where U is the output point, V is the input point (XY location of ellipse) and M is the Rotation Matrix.
Secondly, you could place a second canvas over the first (assuming they are both in a grid, the second canvas is at higher Z-index and is the same size as the underlying canvas). Call it an annotation layer. Your annotations (text labels) can appear at the new transformed locations and unrotated using this approach.
You'd have to do this in code of course, not Xaml, although you might find a binding friendly approach by creating a value converter on the TextBlock that bound to the source RotateTransform/Ellipse and did this operation for you.
Another approach would be to take the .Inverse of the RotateTransform and apply that to the textblocks, however you may still need to translate to get to the new location. Either way I think it demands some experimentation.
Best regards,

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