For some reason the labels for "Date From" and "Date To" are rendering strangely on their bottom edges. See how the datepickers are not rendered correctly because of this.
Anyone know why this is occurring? It only occurs when I start the app from the exectuable. It doesn't happen in the IDE.
It looks like the bounds of the Label controls are spilling over into the DateTimePicker controls. Even when a WinForms control has a transparent background, it is not guaranteed to play nice with other controls in the same container. Try reducing the margins/padding on the labels or select both DateTimePicker controls and use the "bring to front" option.
They have a backcolor that matches the form's backcolor.
There are multiple ways to solve this:
Right-click on the label and choose "Send to Back"
Right-click on the other control and choose "Bring to Front"
Make sure the label's AutoSize property is set to true and move it up a little until it doesn't show
Make sure the label's Padding property is 0, 0, 0, 0 (zero for each subproperty)
It's frighteningly easy in VS to accidentally change the size and location of controls when manipulating them with the mouse. You may just have to move/re-size them so they don't overlap. Try moving with the arrow keys or explicitly giving them numeric position and size values.
As mickeyf notes, it's very easy to accidentally move or resize a control.
To reduce the likelihood of this happening, VS allows you to lock controls. If you right click anywhere on the form, and select "Lock Controls", this will lock every control on the form. I always found this to be too draconian, and rarely used it.
But what I somehow missed until very recently, each control has a "Locked" property that can be set individually. I find this much more convenient - you just lock the controls that tend to be problematic.
For example, I have several forms that have a toolbar at the top, and another control that exactly fills the rest of the form. It's very easy to accidentally bump this control by a pixel or so, and not realize it. Now I just lock those controls, which is way more convenient than locking everything.
Related
Suppose that I have the following form in Designer:
I want to give users the ability to stretch this form as they want and all controls should be located like in the picture, no matter how user changed the size of this form, so they should take the same amount of space and stick to the same controls and borders.
How can I do it in WinForms? I know that there are such things like Docks etc, but I didn't find the correct way to use them in this situation.
You want the Anchor property in this case, not Dock. Anchoring means that a control will always keep the same distance to certain sides (top, left, right, and/or bottom) even if it means that the size must be changed; docking OTOH does not care about margins, it just fills up all available space on one or all sides.
Here's what you might want to do:
Anchor the two image buttons to the top and right.
Anchor the OK button to the right and bottom (I guess).
Anchor the large ListBox to all sides.
Just To Add some notes on good answer of stakx
For Controls Like ListBox that have a limit to their height, setting anchor is not enough and you should set IntegralHeight of them to false.
I reccomend to set MinimumSize of Form to prevent a user from sizing a window to an undesirable size.In your case Set it to a minimum acceptable size to prevent ugly small form with an unusable ListBox.
So I am working on a program that has several screens which causes it to have overlapping controls (Buttons and lists).
I put the controls in panels which works great and then do show/hide for the panels.
This also works well.
I am having a problem now that I am up to several panels where when I move one panel up it gets absorbed by another and I need them to stay separate.
Example: When I move panel2 into place over panel1, panel2 becomes part of panel1. Then when I do panel1.Hide() and panel2.Show(), panel2 is still hidden because it is part of panel1. is there a way for me to ungroup these or move panel2 into place without it automatically becoming part of panel1? (I know I can show hide the controls inside of the panels, but this will add a lot of complexity because I have a ton of controls)
Perhaps there is a better solution than using panels?
You can use the View + Other Windows + Document Outline tool window to get these panels separated again. Drag the inner panel back to the parent. You'll then also have to edit the Location property to get it back in the right position.
This is annoying of course and good odds that you'll have to do this repeatedly. There's a better way to go about it, a TabControl has good design-time support and also has the same "overlapping panel" metaphor. You just need to hide the tabs at runtime. That's pretty easy to do, check the StackPanel control in this answer.
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.
I'm working on a "tricky" UI. Part of what I need to do is easily show and hide various UserControls. Generally one control will occupy the entire main window when needed, the other's will hide.
In WinForms I used to simply use SendToBack and BringToFront and easily showed the control I wanted to show. Now I have no clue. Played around with zorder but that didn't seem to work.
I'm thinking maybe put all the controls I want on the main window, then pro-grammatically resize them and remove the unused ones... or something.
Any ideas?
You should set the Visibility property to Collapsed, Hidden or Visbible depending on whether you want the controls removed, hidden or shown.
As #AresAvatar points out Collapsed removes the control completely so it takes up no space, this means that other controls may move around the container. If the position of elements is important then using Hidden will be the better option.
UIElement.Visibility Property on MSDN
Visibility Enumeration on MSDN
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.