I need to create a custom control that has an expandable part as a panel and a textbox part. The expandable part is a panel, that will either be visible or invisible. But when the panel is visible/expanded directly under the textbox, I do not want the adjacent controls to shift down below the panel, but the panel should just overlay the controls that are there just under the custom control. How would I implement this in Winforms C# project?
I am open to using user control for this scenario.
Thanks
Sunil
I think your implementation of expanding and collapsing is not the best, because you are just overlaying the controls instead of hiding them.
One of the disadvantages is that the overlaid controls might by focussed by pressing tab and they might have a value which I think it is out of target.
I would suggest another implementation by creating two panels (one for the header and another one for the content) and when the collapse button is pressed then the content's panel will be hidden by sitting its Visible property to false and its Hight to 0.
Related
I am new to the winforms and want to create an application that will have a scroll section which I need to make for the buttons which I will add on runtime.
The user will press an add button to add a button containing data which will then be used for the title, description. I need the button to be added to the scroll section and to be automatically placed under the last button in the section so it is organized and so I can scroll up and down through the section.
Like the image has with the scroll bar and the buttons:
How do I solve the problem?
You can use a FlowLayoutPanel with the following properties set:
AutoScroll = true;
FlowDirection = FlowDirection.TopDown;
WrapContents = false;
Once you do that, you can add buttons (or any control) to the Controls collection and it should flow from top to bottom and cause vertical scrollbars to appear once you fill the space.
Note, that it is quite difficult (or virtually impossible) to make a WinForms app look as nice as the one you provided an example of. You would probably be better off using WPF. But my answer should at least solve your particular problem with WinForms.
I have a SplitContainer on my form that has its Dock property set to Fill. It contains several child controls, many of which have event handlers attached to them. Later I decide to put a StatusStrip at the bottom of my form. Guess what, I can't set the StatusStrip to dock to the bottom of my form. The SplitContainer will continue to Fill the entire form. Even though the StatusStrip apparently gets docked to the bottom, it actually hides the bottom part of the SplitContainer behind it.
The only around it is to CUT the SplitContainer and then PASTE it back. Cutting the SplitContainer makes the StatusStrip the only control on my form and thus lets it capture the bottom docking. Afterwards, pasting the SplitContainer allows it to fill the remaining area. In short, docking uses First Come, First Serve method.
Now since my controls have lots of event handlers attached to them, cutting and pasting becomes a nightmare for me. Having my project in C# means I have to attach all those event handlers manually.
Is there a better work around?
This is a z-order issue between the splitter and the statusstrip. When you have a control you want to dock fill and one or more controls you want to dock top, left, right, or bottom, you have to have the fill control be the first in the z-order.
The better way is to open the Document Outline tool, select the SplitContainer and use the up or down buttons to change its z-order.
I should add that in Winforms the z-order is specified by the order in which you add controls to the Controls collection. That order determines the order the associated system controls are created, hence their z-order. Using the Document Outline tool to alter z-order simply causes the generated code to be re-ordered.
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.
Why does the WinForms SplitContainer hide all the Buttons in a Panel (in the left Splitter) when I resize on of its panels? Do I have to write specific code for invalidation of the Panel?
Yes, there's a solution. You can use Anchor property of SplitContainer in winforms. Using which you can set the value of the anchor as you required.
EDIT:
Anchor property will make your control fixed to the winforms design. Even if you resize the control, all the controls that the major control is holding will also resize according to it.
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.