I'm experiencing difficulty with a custom-made User Control, and my searching on Stack Overflow, MSDN, and Google didn't pop up any troubles quite like the one I'm experiencing.
I have a very simple User Control: It's a label, a text box, and a button, with a SaveFileDialog and a FolderSelectDialog available. The text box and button are anchored Left,Right and Right respectively, with the intent that if the control is resized larger, the text box will enlarge to fill the gap, and the button will stay on the right edge of the control.
The problem I am encountering is that when the control is enlarged, the area to the right of the default width of the control becomes blank space when the project is built and run. The pictures here will illustrate what I mean:
In editor:
Running:
The control is smallish in its design window, but when I add it to a form and widen it, it behaves as intended. However, when I run the form the control was added to, half the control isn't visible.
I suspect that I'm overlooking something fairly straightforward, but I wasn't able to find anything addressing this point in my search. Help would be much appreciated.
My guess is that there is a panel or something that is added to your control and will be brought to front somehow runtime.
from property window's top there's a combo from which you can select all the controls in your User Control.
check if all the controls are what you want.
if you find that panel or anything delete it :)
EDIT:
alright this was not your problem.
now I can only assume that you have set some manual sizes to your user control, i.e. in its constructor. in that case designer will show the correct size of you user control,
now some other place in your code, you have set the user controls size manually again. if the layout is suspended and size changes, I think that the anchored controls' size will not change automatically.
if this is your problem, it is probably hard to find.
Related
Here is the problem. If you dynamically place controls in a panel, it works fine, but only until the vertical scrollbar appears. Once there is enough content for this to happen, it starts positioning controls nonsensically.
In my window, you can click a button to add another row of controls inside the panel, which represent options for an item in a list. If you scroll the vertical scrollbar on the panel all the way down and click the button again, the new row of controls will be positioned below the bottom edge of the panel out of view. If you scroll down, there is a huge gap between the new row and the previous row of controls. This should not happen. The positioning code is working flawlessly, as proven by debug output. As far as I can tell, the problem is the stupid anchoring system, however disabling anchoring on these controls does not fix the problem as one might expect. Instead, it just makes it position them wrong in a different manner. This makes no sense at all, and is super annoying!
I tried disabling Autoscroll in code before controls are added to the panel. No change. So I modified that code to disable both the vertical scroll bar and Autoscroll and set the scrollbar to not visible before controls are added. No change again, except that the now disabled vertical scrollbar still manages to appear usable when there is enough content in the panel in spite of it being disabled and set not visible!? That's not supposed to happen when I disabled and made it invisible! With anchoring disabled on the controls being added to the panel and once the vertical scrollbar has appeared, clicking the button to add a few more rows of controls now causes them to be indented a bit for no reason and positioned overlapping each other a bit vertically! It's as if the coordinate system in the panel has somehow arbitrarily changed, because of the presence of a vertical scrollbar and anchoring being disabled on the controls? The debug code shows that the controls are all being placed at correct coordinates, yet they appear positioned very wrongly. So my code is working perfectly, and therefore something else is the problem here.
Everything behaves exactly as expected up until the vertical scrollbar appears. This is so bizarre. Does anyone have any idea what on earth is going on with this stuff? Apparently it is far easier to make it do stupid stuff than to get it working properly.
Thanks again! I got it working. I went with TaW's solution first since it seemed like the simplest solution. Incidentally, I already tried TaW's approach days ago when I was fighting with it, but I had naturally subtracted the AutoScrollPosition value rather than add it, because I didn't expect it to be a negative value!
It seems very odd that control positioning is relative to the current AutoScrollPosition, as absolute coordinates seems like a much more natural, intuitive approach than having negative numbers. I guess that would make it slightly harder to place a control in the currently visible area, but I suppose that's not a big deal as most scrollable interfaces are probably initialized ahead of time and don't need to do that anyway.
I have been working for months on a project in c# in Visual Studio 2010 (it interfaces with a camera, power supplies, and motion control). There is a form with many controls on it (radio buttons, buttons, text boxes, bitmap displays...). Now I would like to put all of that on a tab so i can have another tab. This is so that the second tab can have all the default settings on it (e.g, portnumber, baud rate, integration times, pathname...).
Is this doable? Is there a way to cut and paste or click and drag?
Update:
I created a form, put a button on it that when clicked displays a message box with "Hello World". Then i added a tab control to the form, and dragged the button onto the first tab. The button still functions in the same way, displaying the message box when clicked.
So on my big form, i added a tabcontrol. Without resizing it, i did a select all, then unselected the tabcontrol, then dragged everything onto the tab. I then moved the tab control and resized it, then iteratively resized the tab window and moved all the controls. this worked, except the picturebox controls somehow got resized so they were larger than a screen width. Resized the pictureboxes and everything works. (perhaps i just needed the encouragement to give it a try...sorry if not the best question:).
To do this in code, in Form1.Designer.cs can add:
this.tabPage1.Controls.Add(this.button1);
However, I would have to do this for every single control (about 200 of them in Designer.cs).
This can usually be done with some editing of the .Designer.cs file. First, make sure you make a backup in case it all goes horribly wrong. Place the tab control and add a single control (a button or anything) to it. Then examine the .Designer.cs file. As you point out yourself, you will see a line like this:
this.tabPage1.Controls.Add(this.button1);
As for the existing controls on the form, there will be a bunch of lines like this:
this.Controls.Add(this.meErrorReport);
this.Controls.Add(this.peWarningSign);
this.Controls.Add(this.meHeaderText);
this.Controls.Add(this.btnClose);
So what you do is to cut these lines (not including the one for the tab control!), and paste them just following the line shown above, and do a find-and-replace to change them so they match the first one:
this.tabPage1.Controls.Add(this.meErrorReport);
this.tabPage1.Controls.Add(this.peWarningSign);
this.tabPage1.Controls.Add(this.meHeaderText);
this.tabPage1.Controls.Add(this.btnClose);
This should usually do the trick. The controls may be positioned wrong, and most will be hidden until you increase the size of the tab control, but these are minor problems that can be fixed.
PS. I know you've already fixed your problem, but I'm posting this answer in case it can help you, or someone else, in the future.
I know that label can't receive focus, it doesn't seem to be responsive to tab switching. But all I need is perform some action when user uses tab consequently on a form which has only labels. For example, each label has an associated textbox but this textbox is hidden when the label is visible and vice-versa. What I want is allowing user to use tab to switch between the hidden textboxes on the form, normally, all the textboxes are hidden while all the labels are shown, the labels are supposed to be focusable so that when using tab, it can know that (as some event) to show the associated textbox and hide itself, when switching to another label, the current label whose the associated textbox is shown will become visible again and its associated textbox will become hidden.
I have to implement this kind of 2 in 1 control (textbox and label in a composited control) because I just want to show only the text (no border and background) as if the textbox has a transparent background and only show the textbox (and hide the label) when user need to edit (start by clicking on the field or using tab). This should have been easier for me if there was a transparent background textbox but there isn't a decent one in the world of windows forms. Please notice that I also know of the alpha blend transparent textbox presented in an article in codeproject but it can't meet my need because the text is rendered wrong with ugly border around the text path (some kind of missing antialiasing but it's even worse than that).
I'm really pity if this mechanism can't be implemented, the forms look better when all the fields seem to show info only but a click or tab switch can let user jump in edit mode.
I hope there is some solution out there. Thank you in advance.
I found this solution by a whim in my mind. I didn't think there was such a solution but it does help solve my problem (and I'm sure many others will benefit from it). Simply I have to create my own Label inheriting UserControl. I didn't thought of UserControl before and it is very helpful. Focusability, transparent background, borderlessness are all which can be done easily to a UserControl. The only custom feature I have to do myself is rendering the text which is also very simple and there are many ways to do. I just add a Label to the UserControl and set Label's Dock to DockStyle.Fill, adjust the height of the UserControl properly and that's all.
Thank God helping me think of UserControl before trying any other complicated solution such as listening to TAB and SHIFT + TAB keypress events.
Finishing up a register form in a C# application and I noticed with the panel if I enable AutoScroll and then have a textbox that is below the scroll and click on it it jumps all the way back up to the top. Is there a way to fix this with some code or is it a propriety?
It's a little difficult for me to explain it in words, so here's a short video that shows the behavior.
I have had the same problem. I fixed it with this code in my panel:
protected override Point ScrollToControl(Control activeControl)
{
return this.AutoScrollPosition;
}
I had this exact problem. I had to remove the docking from my panels on the form and this fixed the problem.
Since apparently no one has seen this behavior before and could provide a quick answer, I opened up Visual Studio to try and reproduce what you describe.
I created a new WinForms project with a GroupBox containing a Panel whose AutoScroll property is set to "True". Then, I added two new GroupBox controls inside of the Panel, each containing two TextBox controls. The first embedded GroupBox is at the top of the form, entirely visible at startup; the second embedded GroupBox is at the bottom where it must be scrolled into view. This is equivalent to the design/layout that you have as best I can tell from your description and video.
However, when I run the project, scroll down to the second embedded GroupBox and select one of the TextBox controls that it contains, it performs exactly as expected. The TextBox control that I clicked on gets the focus, without scrolling the entire panel back up to the top. I can't seem to reproduce what you're seeing. If you could either tell me what I've done wrong in designing my test sample or post the smallest sample project needed to recreate the behavior you're experiencing, I might be able to help.
Otherwise, here are a few suggestions of things to investigate:
The tab order of the objects on your form. This really shouldn't be causing the behavior described because clicking on a control should set the focus to that control, regardless of its position in the tab order, and jumbling up the tab order multiple times in my sample project still doesn't appear to have the same effect. But I suppose it's worth a try anyway. In Design Mode, go to your "View" menu, and click "Tab Order". All of the controls that you can set the tab order for will have a little colored box at their top-left corner, indicating their tab order in each container. To set the tab order, click once on each of the controls in the natural order you want them to be focused.
Scour your code for any <Control>.Focus or <Control.Select> statements. Make sure that you don't have any validation code that's altering the tab order in any way during run-time. This could be causing focus to jump back to a control located near the top of your Panel, forcing it to auto-scroll to the new location.
Try to reproduce the behavior in a brand new, clean project. Ideally, create a new project in Visual Studio and lay out the controls the exact same way you have them in the project with which you're experiencing difficulties. This is the same thing I did, partly because I don't have your particular project to work with, and also because this is the best way to troubleshoot particularly tricky behavior. It's more likely there is some quirk to your design or source code that's causing this behavior, rather than some kind of bug in the controls themselves. But either way, this will let you know exactly where the problem is occurring, which will get you that much closer to a solution.
You can use TableLayoutPanel" instead of "Panel" to avoid scrollbar change its position.
I've a strange problem regarding auto sizing of a panel in a user control. This panel is anchored to all 4 sides of the user control.
But the anchoring not always works as it should:
If the user control is resized by resizing the form, the right and bottom anchors don't work. But if the control is resized by using a splitter which is in the form, it works correctly.
All other controls which are also affected by resizing work correctly, just this panel won't do.
I can't see the difference between resizing through a splitter and through a form.
Setting the size manually in the OnResize of the UserControl only works if the resizing is done by moving the splitter. If the resizing occurs by resizing the form, the heigth and the width of the panel won't change to the new values.
Edit: To make it more clear: The user control is added to a TabPage and set to Dock=DockType.Fill.
Edit2: To make it more complicated: This is the hierarchy the control is used:
The Form contains a splitter with 2 controls (A and B). (B) contains a user control (C) with a splitContainer. The split container->panel1 in (C) contains a tabcontrol (D). This tabcontrol (D) contains a user control (E) (in a tabpage) . This user control (E) has a splitcontainer (F) in which another usercontrol with a tabControl (G) is placed. This tabcontrol (G) has tabpages, and in this pages is the described user control (H) placed.
If I place the control (H) directly to the panel in the splitcontainer (C) everything works fine. Since all controls which are added to a splitcontainer or a tabpage are set to docktype=fill, I cannot see why the last control has this problems.
Is there any limitation in the Windows Forms framework which limits the amount of child controls?
Edit: I have uploaded a TestApplication with which you can reproduce this issue.
http://rapidshare.de/files/49092516/TestApplication.zip.html
It occurs only under Vista. Win XP and 7 work properly...
If you resize the form, the textBox with the "..." button won't resize, but if you resize via the vertical splitContainer, it works.
There is a bug with deep nesting where the kernel runs out of stack space causing resizing, docking and anchoring to fail silently.
See https://web.archive.org/web/20140818095718/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953934
You have talked about both "anchor" and "dock", which can serve similar purposes but act differently. Your problem may be that you are trying to do both, and this is interfering with the behavior you want. If not, perhaps try switching from the one to the other.
It sounds like you've double checked the ansectery of the control, but did you examine it with: View->Other Windows->Document Outline (a very handy tool I only recently discovered)?
Finally, while it doesn't directly solve your problem, it sounds like you have a very complicated UI, and your users may benefit if you were to spend some time to consider if you could simplify the UI. Of course, I don't know your users or the purpose of the app, and what you have may be the best, but it sounds like it might be time to ask this question.
Good luck.
The problem is not the depth of nesting; controls can be nested arbitrarily deep. Anchoring and Docking generally do not play nicely with each other. I usually favor docking over anchoring, but, whichever solution you choose, you should probably avoid mixing them.