I have a section of a form where the controls (text boxs, labels etc) need to be built at run time depending on options a user has selected. There will probably be about 7 - 10 different layouts in all.
What's the best way to go about creating and maintaining them?
Cheers
Luke
It would be helpful to know more about the specifics of your situation (what kind of options are we talking about?)
But off the top of my head, I'd guess you probably want to create a set of Panels which would contain the appropriate controls then hide or show them depending on the options.
I have actually had to do just this. I did it with a set of panels (as #David suggests) and also a TreeView. Using the tree view, I customized the visuals to make them mimic an options menu in Microsoft Office, and then I show the appropriate panel based on the user's selection of nodes. If you'd like to see code samples let me know.
All WinForms controls has corresponding classes (Button, Link, EditBox etc.) You can create any controls you want and attach them to form.
Inside the form Init you can add new controls into Controls collection.
public void Init()
{
this.Controls.Add(new TextBox());
}
Some more details in MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0h5y8567.aspx
Related
My program will prompt the user for a number, i.e. 25. The program will then start the "main form" with 25 controls (textbox). The 25 (or whatever number) of textboxes (or whatever control) will need to be formatted evenly. I will also need to be able to retrieve the text (or another property if I use another control) in order, from left to right and up to down. What is the best method of approaching this?
Using WPF MVVM. In a .XAML file, create a DataTemplate with the DataType of a ViewModel that will provide the binding for your TextBoxs, lets call this the TextboxViewModel. Then using a ItemsControl element with an ItemsSource of TextboxViewModel. You'll be able to instantiate as many TextBoxs as you want and be able to get the result by browsing through your list of TextboxViewModel.
Supposing you are using Windows Forms here.
Dynamically create the X controls and add them to the Controls collection of your form. To ease the access to them you can store their reference in a List and set some event handlers too, depending on your needs. You just need to calculate their positions while you add them.
If WinForms, this is exactly what the FlowLayoutPanel is for. Just add the controls to it and they will arrange themselves automatically, wrapping down to the next row as needed. As Mihai already suggested, you could also keep reference to those controls in a List.
Another option would be to use a TableLayoutPanel. It's a little more difficult to learn and use, but is much more flexible and powerful.
Can someone suggest the best way to achieve my goal?
So, I have a form with three buttons. What I want is, depending on what button is pressed on panel should be shown different controls (user control). I made this in a simple way: all are added from the beginning, I just make change to the visibility. But what would be nice is, if someone can suggest a more appropriate way, because there is no need to have objects created from beginning.
You can always create the appropriate UserControl, and add it to the Panel.Controls at runtime. This will allow you to create the control(s) as needed, instead of on initialization of your Form.
I would indeed create the controls at design time - if there's advantage no to dynamically create them. Why complicate matters?
If there are a number of controls I would put them all in a panel (within the panel you've already mentioned) so you're only changing the visibility of a single control (the panel) rather than each one within it.
When you press the appropriate button show the appropriate panel (and remember to hide the others in case you've previously shown them)
I'm working with a GUI in PowerShell and trying to make the form such that, after the form is built, the user can interact with the part of the form (+/- button) to dynamically add a group of controls to the form underneath of the existing set.
As an example, there will be a combobox (drop-down) to select a parameter and then a text field to fill in the value for the selected parameter.
What I'm looking for is a way to dynamically add that group of controls to the form when the user clicks the plus button. My current attempts have failed. I've tried pinning the controls inside of a TableLayoutPanel and a Panel object but can't seem to get the items to appear in the first place and then appear in some semblence of order. Is there a GUI object that I can pin the controls to that will just auto-dump the next row of controls below the existing or do I have to figure out the calculations off of the docked parent and offset the Y-values?
Does anyone know a PowerShell accessible Windows form control that would support this type of additions?
One of my attempts is psoted here: .NET 4 (WinForms) Dynamic Form Control Creation in Powershell
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Maybe you could use FlowLayoutPanel. Here is the sample script for using FlowLayoutPanel in Powershell
It's not Winforms, but there is a new module up on Codeplex called ShowUI, which enables you to create WPF based UI's in PowerShell. Take a look at http://showui.codeplex.com. There is some examples up there on using Grid controls and automatic layouts, that I think could meet your needs if you are willing to jump into WPF.
Got the answer from a Microsoft PowerShell forum Moderator:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ITCG/thread/b2c8abeb-3ae6-4936-9bef-a50a79fdff45/
it's the datagridview object that needs to be used.
Can't you simply build your form (for example with Sapiens free editor tool) with all the controls invisible, and then according to the user choice make them visible ?
I'm using different sets of controls on the same location on a form. By default all are visible=false and then certain subsets of the controls are set to visible as the user selects specific values in a combobox dropdown control.
From the user's perspective this works well since they only see the controls that are needed.
However, since the controls occupy the same location on the form it is difficult to manage these in Visual Studio design view.
Is there a way to group sets of these overlapping controls in Visual Studio so that I can select the entire subset of controls quickly and easily? Is there a way to hide certain controls in design view? Right now everything is stacked on top of each other when developing so it makes managing these controls difficult.
To get such a beast to work i would put every group into it's own UserControl. On your MainForm you stack all these UserControls above each other.
So at the MainForm you can't really get a good overview, but now you got for every group your individual designer view and in your main form you can hide the complete group by a single line of code userControl.Visible = false.
A TabControl can do this, works well in design mode. You just need to hide the tabs at runtime. Check my code in this thread.
You can not hide them.
However you can group them in group box
and using "Bring to front" and "Send to back" property deal with them.
First of all,
If you work with multiple components in same location, you can use groupboxes in your form. Then, to superimpose these groupboxes, you should edit each of your groupboxes on different place in your form screen. After the edit, you should input size and location data manually in your groupbox properties menu.
If you want to edit one of your groupbox after the set location, you can easily right click any of your groupboxes then click "send to back" and "bring in front" commands. I hope it helps.
I'm trying to create an options menu in a C# forms project, and I'm curious if there's a less ugly way to do this. I have a ListBox that has the different categories of options, and when you select a category, the options for that category appear in a panel on the right. Basically, something identical to the options menu in Visual Studio itself.
Obviously, different controls have to use the same real estate here, as every category has different options which need to be displayed in the same area of my form. So when you select a category, the controls for every other category must become hidden.
I'm currently using a different Panel object for each category (13 currently), but designing each panel is a headache because i need to drag the other 12 panels out of the way each time I need to alter one. Is there a better way to do this? I'm open to any suggestions, whether its a complete change in the implementation, or even just a Visual Studio tip for working with 1 of 13 panels that all overlap.
If all else fails I could use a TabControl rendered horizontally, but I don't like how that looks.
Thanks in advance.
I can think of three alternate approaches:
(Ok) Use a tab control that doesn't display the headers for the user.
(Better) Create user controls for each option page, so you have different designer files for each.
(Better yet?) Dynamically generate the UI based on some descriptive information, so there are no designer files to deal with at all.
Take a look at the UserControl class. You can design on it with the Forms Designer, than programatically place it to the right of your ListBox when items are selected. Create a different UserControl for each category of options that you have.
First you should know when you are in Design Mode that there is a drop down menu from the Properties Windows (View->Prpoerties Menu), that allows you to select a control. So you don't need to move other controls out of the way encesarily.
Second, I would make the options panel for each category it's own user or custom control. This way you can edit the panel itself seperately. Then you have the option of showing/hiding that custom control when it's category is selected, or even dynamically creating the control.