I'm just getting started with winforms in C# and things are going well, except I want to learn how to do something like:
if user presses "proceed" button, it will run some code, and change the form, so that there are more options available to the user on the form. In other words, I want to make my forms more than one "page". I hope that all makes sense. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
You could have a tab control with separate tabs that you move through that are disabled until they are needed. Each one could have its own controls, etc... You could have the controls disabled on the main form and then enable them, etc... There are myriad ways that you could approach this problem.
For winforms:
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
textBox1.Visible = true;
}
One easy way of doing that is to add a container control, for example a GroupBox that contains a selection of controls that belongs together and then you make that GroupBox invisible. Then in the button click handler you make it visible again.
That way all the related controls are shown/hidden together and if needed you can move them around the screen without needing to worry about their locations related to each other.
I want to make my forms more than one "page"
When I do that, I normally build each "page" as custom control. This let's me separate the navigation elements from what it is you're navigating to, so that I can easily play with different ideas later. For example, do I want to use a tab control to host each page inside a separate tab? No bid deal - just drop one my controls on each tab. Swap out different pages on the same form? It's only one control to replace. Move between completely different forms? Still easy.
As a basic starting point, if you want to run some code when the user clicks the button just handle the Click event. Just double click the button to get to the code-behind and place your code in there.
In terms of exposing extra functionality when the user clicks proceed there are various options available to you, its really up to you to figure out which is best suited to your application. One simple option would be to perhaps have a Panel or GroupBox and place all the extra options on there and make it disabled, then enable when you see fit.
Related
I'm not even sure if I'm using the right terms for what I'm trying to do. But basically I have a personal organizer program with content that changes depending on what task you're doing, a calendar vs. contact list vs. todo list etc.
My searches keep bringing up "Navigation" but I'm not sure that this is what I'm after, as I don't want to be stuck going forwards and backwards between pages. I want the user to be able to click on a link or button and be able to jump to any point in the program. Am I better off just removing all the controls and adding the new ones each time? I'd like to keep it all within one window if possible.
If I were in your situation, I would use tabs. Set up an individual tab for each each "task" (calender, contact list, todo list). This way users are one click away from any task they want to navigate to.
You want to use user controls. Each user control is like a sub-page of controls. Then you keep the same master page and just switch user controls based on what you want to show. You can put the user controls on separate tabs if you like or you can put them one after the other and make them visible/invisible or you can load them dynamically with code like
myBorder.Child = new MyUserControl();
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 need to implement TabControl-like behaviour with manual (on event, on a button click for example) pages switching and having all pages designed and implemented as separate forms. A form to be incorporated (as a panel control) inside main form and replaced by another form as needed.
How to achieve this?
PS: The reason why I don't want to use TabControl instead is because there are going to be too many tabs - I'd prefer to present the list of them as a TreeView and instantiate on demand. The another reason comes from another project of mine - there I am going to implement plug-ins, where a panel inside main window will be provided by a class loaded dynamically and will be runtime-switchable.
I need to implement TabControl-like behaviour with manual (on event, on a button click for example) pages switching and having all pages designed and implemented as separate forms
May I ask why this is a requirement? It seems like the logical approach would be to create a set of UserControls. You can place a UserControl in a form, and you can place a UserControl in a tab. You get modularity without the headache of implementing a very odd requirement which is a use case that the API developers obviously did not think was valid. I just can't think of a good reason to take the route you have suggested.
I did similar thing once, and for that reason, I have ReplaceControl method, which I paste below:
static public void ReplaceControl(Control ToReplace, Form ReplaceWith) {
ReplaceWith.TopLevel=false;
ReplaceWith.FormBorderStyle=FormBorderStyle.None;
ReplaceWith.Show();
ReplaceWith.Anchor=ToReplace.Anchor;
ReplaceWith.Dock=ToReplace.Dock;
ReplaceWith.Font=ToReplace.Font;
ReplaceWith.Size=ToReplace.Size;
ReplaceWith.Location=ToReplace.Location;
ToReplace.Parent.Controls.Add(ReplaceWith);
ToReplace.Visible=false;
}
Only thing left to do is to create some control manually on the form, as the placeholder for your Form. Use label, for example.
You could do this with an MDIForm as the main form, and then plain-old Forms as the separate forms. Or you could encapsulate each element's functionality as a UserControl which you can then swap out on your form in code.
The advantage of encapsulating your UI elements as UserControls is that if, for whatever reason, you need them to become forms in your application, you can just drop the UserControl on a form.
Update: Since you want to use a TreeView to select what the user is looking at, you definitely want to do this as a bunch of UserControls. The layout is simple: TreeView on the left, and whichever control is active on the right.
There's no need to justify not using a TabControl - tabs are the worst UI element in history.
if one part of one form of our app has many views - let's say depending on a radio button selection some where else on that form - then sometimes using a TabControl with some tabPages can be easy and helpful to show different views based on that selection.
so I still would like to have that "multiple views" functionality but I do not want to use a TabPage.... what would be the best replacement for that?
As far as I know, you'll have to code such a control yourself if you desire a lot of functionality. For regular operations, however, you can use this control I found on CodeProject: Multipane Control.
You could just have a Panel or something to define the area and then you could create one User control for each "view" that you want and then when the user selects a different radio button you just shows/hides the relevant user controls inside that Panel.
Or if the "views" are very simple, maybe the User controls would be overkill and you could just have a GroupBox for each view that you show/hide, but that can quickly create messy code if there are lots of event handlers etc.
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.