I have to design a control_panel form. This will have many tabs. How should I design this? Should I make different new forms for each tab or is there a concept of Masterpage in C# WinForms?
Please give me your opinions. Thanks.
It's easy enough to whip up something like this in WinForms, using a TabControl, filled with several different TabPages, and a corresponding ImageList to hold the icons for each tab:
Then you can just place the controls you want on each TabPage as you normally would. The designer has excellent built-in support for the TabControl, allowing you to simply click on the tab you want to switch to it as you could if your application was running. Here's a tutorial on implementing tabs in C#.
If you need more extensibility and encapsulation than provided by adding individual controls to each TabPage, you can create a custom UserControl corresponding to each of your tabs, and then place an instance of that UserControl into the TabPage. I don't really know much about MasterPages, but creating a base UserControl that all of your other UserControls inherit off (and then add their unique elements) of seems like it would provide similar functionality.
You have tab control in windows form.
you can go through MSDN article for creating tabs.
Related
I am doing my first steps programming a little toolbox in C#.
I want to choose the program to run via a menustrip.
How can I switch all visible textboxes, buttons etc. on the same form? I don't want to open a new form. Do I have to show/hide every element "by hand" or is there a better solution?
I hope you get my problem.
Thanks in advance.
Yes totally understood.
You need a way to navigate between different fragments within your application.
Since these are your first steps and not a legacy app, why aren't you starting with WPF which is the successor of Winforms ? (newer better)
See how can you achieve such functionally in WPF
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/wpf/app-development/navigation-overview?view=netframeworkdesktop-4.8
Although the terms are similar and also apply in winforms.
What you want to do is to create all the buttons etc as part of a UserControl. You can then add your custom UserControl to the form. This should allow you to switch the user control for some other control, or change the visibility for the whole user control.
This can also allow you to place multiple user controls side by side or in some other layout.
so far I have been using a standard winforms TabControl to host my different modules of my application statically, for example different GridViews. But this way the whole form becomes too big as it contains too many controls.
I would like to separate all the different "pages" each as a UserControl (from what I've heard, that's better than using Forms). Is that ok? And how is that best implemented with Telerik controls?
I thought about using a RadDock control and add my UserControls as tabbedDocuments to it.
DocumentWindow docWindow = new DocumentWindow();
MyUserControls.FirstGrid ctrl = new MyUserControls.FirstGrid();
docWindow.Controls.Add(ctrl);
radDock1.AddDocument(docWindow);
Is that ok to do? Is there a better way?
Forms are very different compared to UserControls. I don't know exactly how you would like to separate the different pages of your application, but a UserControl always requires something to 'host' or display the UserControl in. A Form is a 'standalone window', basically.
Using the RadDock and tabbed documents is a valid way of doing it, but there a plenty of ways to separate different pages in your application, so I can't say which one fits best your requirements.
I have two propositions for you:
If you decide to go with UserControls, you can use RadPageView (or RadDock) and on each RadPageViewPage (or DocumentWindow in RadDock) to add the UserControl in the Controls collection and show it.
You can use the Auto MDI functionality of RadDock and show your forms as MDI windows in it. More information is available here.
I have a winforms tab control which has several tab pages. Within each tab page controls (textboxes, radio buttons, etc...) are group into groupboxes. These group boxes are arranged from top to bottom but in some occassions some groupboxes needs to be visible and other ones to be hidden. Also control within each group box sometimes (depending on the scenario) needs to be visible and sometimes hidden. So I would like to know if someone knows a good approach to do this, maybe some kind of pattern if any. Also it would be good to implement a generic solution to do this. Could any expert in GUI guide me in the right direction to do this?
Using C# and dot NET Framework 4.0, WinForms. This is a desktop application, not Web-based.
You can define the scenarios in a class then add another class that will manage the layout by reading the scenario and laying the elements based on the scenario. I have not provided details because it varies on how specific you want to be and what behavior you want to achieve. It is better to put the Widgets inside a User Control and let that user control communicate with the layout manager.You can use the Mediator pattern or variation of it to coordinate between the widgets. Hope this helps.
I usually try to group related controls into UserControls (even if this means doubling up on some controls) and adding them to or removing them from the form as needed. An example of this could be payment methods - when the user selects a specific payment method (Credit Card, Cash, Cheque, etc) a UserControl with the correct elements is displayed within a panel on the form.
A good pattern to use when managing this sort of set up is Model-View-Presenter, in the example, all the UserControls would probably implement an IPaymentMethod view interface and provide a way to update the corresponding models.
All in WPF:
Developing a wizard application, user has to answer a number of simple questions before brought to the main app. The main app is then prefilled with the information obtained from the wizard.
I started with a Window which I then planned to add usercontrols to. The main window would have the user control in the first row, then Next and Previous buttons to control moving between the controls in the second row. This way I could easily control the logic to switch between screens like:
WizardControl1.IsVisible = false;
WizardControl2.IsVisible = true;
But for some reason, user controls do not have setter for IsVisible. Hurray.
So then I thought I would just use seperate windows for each section of the wizard. The problem with this approach is that now when stepping between, the window opens in random positions, and by steppign through the wizard with next, the next window pops up randomly which is really distracting and frustrating.
So how can I develop a wizard properly? I don't get why this is so hard...not exactly rocket science... replacing text and controls and storing input after pressing next/previous!
Thanks
Check this link:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/InternationalizedWizard.aspx
This is the article about building wizard in WPF by Josh Smith, it's seems to be nice pattern.
I found it's helpful for me, hope you'll too.
There is also an open source Avalon Wizard control on codeplex.
I'd probably aproach this using data binding and template selectors. Have the wizard form bind to a "WizardData" class, which exposes a list of "WizardPage" base classes.
The WizardData class can expose properties defining the correct info on the forms, and display a control for the main page that uses a template selector to determine the proper control to display based on the actual type of the particular wizard page.
It sounds like more work than it is, really. It also gives you the benefit of good separation between code and UI (all "work" is done by the WizardData and WizardPage classes), and the ability to test logic independent of the UI.
It's also a very WPF/MVVM way of approaching the problem.
I recognize this does not directly address your question, but I thought I'd mention it as a possible alternative. I've used Actipro's Wizard control with pretty good results, and when I have needed support, they have been very responsive. I am not affiliated with them in any way; I just like not having to write the plumbing to manage a wizard.
The property is called "Visibility".
I find that I do better when I dynamically add and removing controls rather than hide them.
I was looking for a Wizard solution too. I have the need to stick with stock WPF components so I implemented the wizard using a standard form and a tab control.
I only hide the tabs at runtime so there available in the IDE. At runtime just use Back, Next, Finish... to navigate thru the tab items
works good
User Controls -- Do they serve a special purpose?
As far as I can tell they are no different to forms - they have the same toolbox and features.
Are there certain times when they are appropriate to use over forms?
It would be interesting to understand what they are good for.
You use them to group a set of controls and behaviors together in a re-usable way. You can't show a control on the screen unless it's added to a form somewhere.
One good example is a textbox. It's very common to have a label next to your textboxes. You can build a user control to make this easier. Just drop a label and a textbox on the control, expose whatever your properties you want, setup the new control in your toolbox, and now you can just drop this control on your form instead of needing to arrange a label and a toolbox on the form separately.
You could kind of think of them as a panel which "remembers" what controls you put on it. And there's one more important piece. You can put code in these controls as well, and use that to also build special behaviors into your custom controls.
I have to disagree (slightly) with the selected answer. Reusability is only part of what a UserControl is for.
All Controls are reusable. Almost all controls are reusable on the same Form/Window/Panel/etc. For example, a TextBox is a control.
There are two ways to create your own reusable control:
Custom Control
Completely custom, and reusable.
Created entirely in code.
You get a bit more granular control over what your control is doing this way.
Lighter weight (usually), because there isn't anything added in for designability within Visual Studio.
In ASP.Net only: No "HTML" type file to use or edit.
User Control
Completely custom, and reusable.
Created partially in a designer in Visual Studio, and partially in code. (via code behind)
Much easier to deal with from a visual aspect.
A little heavier, as there is pre-existing code added in by the framework to support designing inside Visual Studio.
In ASP.Net only: You can change the appearance a bit simply by editing the .ascx file (basically HTML).
User Controls serve the purpose of reusing controls.
Imagine you need a search box in several pages of your application. You can create a search user control and drop it in every page where you want it visible.
So, it's nothing more than a container that aggregates reusable blocks for your pages.
Forms have a lot of extra furniture that you don't need if you simply want a collection of controls together - the minimize and maximize buttons for example. If you just simply grouped your controls in a Panel, you'd have all the event handlers on the same form as the panel - with a user control, the event handling code is in the user control class, not the form class.
You can reuse the same control on many forms. In fact all items you are using while creating windows forms are the controls. User controls are just extra controls extending controls library provided by .NET.
In ASP.NET, user controls enable you to split your page into reusable components. For example, you may want to have a search box which can be used in different places on your website, so you'd use a user control. They can also be used for partial page caching. You can cache portions of your page to improve performance.