Whats the best control to use in wpf applicaion for loading big text files into? And its not just simple as that, i need to be able to hightlight/change background/color of some lines. I was thinking of using RichTextBox.. but though i just come and ask what other people think.
I dont need to edit the text, just highlight lines with errors
EDIT: Ah i forgot to mention, text file content is processed by the program what will change the background color of some lines. Would be nice to give user a change to do that allso when the program failes to find some error lines.
EDIT2: The application is for parsing log files, so the files might be big, over 50 000 lines..
I didn't understand if you only want to display files or allow user to edit them.
Either way, maybe ScintillaNET would be useful to you.
Well known text editor, Notepad++ uses Scintilla :)
You could grab notepad++ sources at http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/, but It's written in c++, so the API would be a bit different than in .NET.
EDIT
Notepad++ is capable of displaying files of around 100-200MB. If you need better than that, you would need to implement some kind of paging technology/virtual mode (do not load entire file, only the portion that would be displayed on the screen depending on current scrollbar position)
If Scintilla seems an overkill, then maybe you'd be better off with simply building a DataGrid. If log entries consist of several fields, these could become columns and would be even easier to read. If you want to go that route, first parse your log file into a List of LogEntry, then use databinding to bind to it. You could read your file incrementally as new lines get added for better user experience.
I think RichTextBox will be most appropriate in this case but as CharithJ said you cannot load whole log in to it at one time it will be too much performance hit.
What I would do in scenario like this is .. I will have a Richtextbox along with two small up and down buttons for kind of scroll. I will only load some text of log at one time let's say x number of characters. Once user clicks the up or down scroll button, I would remove some text from start and end depending on which button user have clicked, up or down and based on that I would remove some text from richbox and append some other.
Either you can do something like I suggested above, or one other way could be to extend the RichTextBox control and implement logic that only forwards a limited text to RichTextBox for display at a time. You can handle scroll related events to make changes in RichTextBox's content.
Related
I am trying to figure out the best way to proceed about paging my text in my UI so that viewer performance does not get impacted while at the same to making sure it is editable.
I have tried using the WPF RichTextBox control which allows for editing but when posting text with length above a certain amount you lose viewing performance and it drags. I also tried using the FlowDocumentPageViewer which gives me the visual performance I want but without the editing.
I want to be able to edit while maintaining visual performance with large quantities of text data posted to my UI. Can a FlowDocumentPageViewer provide that in someway? Or is there another?
I'm currently working on a C#/WPF program where I'm displaying a lot of text data(replaying a text log). This runs on a timer that reads from text files and then sends the data to a User Control that will display them. The problem I'm having is that it takes more than one second to display the data that covers said second(due to the amount of data, ~11k lines pr second) in the TextBlock I'm using. If I skip the displaying part the timer/program runs just fine without any delays.
What is the best UI element to display this amount of data with in regards to update speed?
With large data, you are almost always better off if you paginate the results.
This is the approach google takes with their search results. You get millions but only a fraction are on the first page.
Microsoft gives you the tools to accomplish this - FlowDocument
You can very quickly get professional looking reader style output, like a Kindle screen.
Try AvalonEdit which is great at handling large data, unlike TextBox/Block which makes UI unresponsive when dealing with large data. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/42490/Using-AvalonEdit-WPF-Text-Editor
Are you sure users would need the entire data? You can alternatively just show the tail of logs (e.g. last 100K lines) and provide a link to download the entire text or some kind of paging mechanism.
You could create a collection of your log messages / strings / lines, and use them as the itemssource of a virtualizing panel, such as the Listbox uses it by default. Only those messages that are actually in the field of view will be rendered.
I wrote my first C# program a while ago. It got somewhat big. My .settings file has over 20 different parameters - booleans, sizes, strings, ints. I'd like to provide users with a GUI to change them during runtime instead of editing the app.exe.config file which is somewhat advanced and confusing.
I'm very inexperienced with C# but seems like there should be a better way than for me to manually create a form, drag in labels, inputs, checkboxes, radio buttons, and manually handle all gui events and what happens when values get changed and whatnot. Building this gui by hand seems like a lot of work.
How do you guys handle the settings of a C# app? Can't I generate something from the XML?
In WinForms applications you can add a control to a Form and then click the (PropertyBinding) under (ApplicationSettings) in the Property box.
The dialog allows you to bind properties of the control to a parameter in the config file. It is an extra step during design but it must be done.
These settings will end up in the user config file (I strongly advise against the application config file for this)
You will have to provide the user with a way to specify these settings by either:
having the user edit the config file - very dangerous because it is very easy to mess that up.
allowing the user to manipulate the UI (drag-drop) and save the settings from code. - a lot of work to prevent the user painting himself in a corner.
a separate/standalone designer application that combines 1. and 2.
In WPF you can use DataGrid or ListView for your task. However, if you are inexperienced with C# or WPF, it is maybe faster to do the settings form by hand.
I have a C# win form where I read a file and show lines in a datagridview. Everything works fine.. and I use delegate and Invoke for displaying the lines as they are being read. It also shows a progressbar and does some other stuff like calculating line length and parse the lines to extract certain fields from each line.
Just curious, if anybody has tried this kind of implementation. Currently my app reads a 250MB file (having ~ 12000 lines) in little over 3 minutes (Win 7 32bit/celeron 2.66Ghz/4GB). I was wondering if it is possible to reduce the time - more of like by changing the way I implemented it.
Well, you're quite right to have second thoughts about this. What's probably the toughest read possible, War and Peace by Tolstoy, has roughly half a million words. What you're dumping to the screen is a hundred times more. It doesn't really matter how long it takes to put this much info on the screen, it will take your user a wholeheckofalot longer to even scroll through it.
I personally hesitate to ever put anything more than, oh, 50 items in a list. 100 tops. Beyond that, it becomes sheer torture for a human being.
To get there, allow your user to filter content, gradually drilling down in the huge result set to a relevant item. Exactly what that ought to look like is not clear from your question. Think about it for a bit, I'm sure you'll come up with something.
Ok...I love these questions. Why are you showing a user 250mbs of data in a data grid? There is NO WAY that an end user can process understand 250mbs of data in a grid. If the end user is pressuring you for this feature you need to address it with them from a "this is a bad idea" standpoint. Performance problems can usually be solved in most cases by educating the user. :-D
First, you need not load the entire file, nor display it. You can load portions of it for display. i.e. in the grid, you cannot show the enire file anyway, the screen is only so big. Consider loading only what you display (plus a few extra lines for smooth scrolling) and load the rest on demand as the user is scrolling through the content. The user will be unaware that the file is only partially loaded.
Even nicer would be if you have some logical grouping, in a book you could display the chapters, in a financial type application, either by account or time period.
Maybe something like VirtualMode can helps you:
Virtual mode is designed for use with very large stores of data. When the VirtualMode property is true, you create a DataGridView with a set number of rows and columns and then handle the CellValueNeeded event to populate the cells. Virtual mode requires implementation of an underlying data cache to handle the population, editing, and deletion of DataGridView cells based on actions of the user. For more information about implementing virtual mode, see How to: Implement Virtual Mode in the Windows Forms DataGridView Control.
P.S. About performance: no one except profiling tool can't helps you to solve any performance-related problems.
I am looking for a decent replacement for the standard windows YES/NO or YES/NO/CANCEL MessageBox.
I have often seen these standard dialogs misused in ways such as: "To save in plain text answer YES, or to save in html answer NO". Obviously, the text should read "Save As: and the "buttons should be labeled "Text" and "HTML". It is not a yes/no question that is being asked, and although it could be phrased that way, it would not be easy to read and understand.
Microsoft gives no way to change the text on the buttons. There is no fast/simple way to build a replacement from scratch... as evidenced by the number of applications using the awkward style mentioned above.
Is there any free C# replacement dialog or MessageBox out there that lets you at least:
- specify the number of buttons
- specify the text to appear on each button
- specify the default button
I have looked and have been unable to find one.
(I would build one myself, but I am not familiar enough with all the behaviors that a fully functional control should have, since I only need/use/know a small subset. Two examples I don't use: themes and internationalization. I need something that my coworkers will also want to use.)
Check out Dissecting the MessageBox on CodeProject. The project is a bit dated, but it's pretty much exactly what you're looking for and it shouldn't take much to update it.
Depending on your target platform, a task dialog may be a good way of doing this. There is a .NET wrapper for task dialogs in the Windows API Code Pack. However these are provided only in Windows Vista and above, not in XP or 2003.
Frankly, it is not that difficult to create such a Messagebox yourself, we have such a thing working in the current app we are developing.
What you need is a FlowLayout for the buttons that will auto-align any buttons you create. Our API then has something like (params Tuple<string,DialogResult>[] buttons)
Tuple is a helper class that contains two values. The string is the Text of the button, the Dialogresult is the one our messagebox returns when the button with said text is clicked.
I agree with Frank. It wouldn't be too difficult to create your own generic form that handles this for you. Without getting into code, the form should do the following
1) Have a property to set the message you want to show to the user.
2) Have a method for adding buttons, with 2 arguments, one for the button text, and one for the dialog result
3) When the form is displayed, it should be in modal dialog mode so that the rest of the application is inactive while until one of the options is clicked.
So, to create a Save As/Don't Save/Cancel, you would add 3 buttons in step 2, all with the appropriate button text and dialog result.
Using Flow layout, you should be able to get it to display properly regardless of the size of the message, or the number of buttons.