I am working on a largish C# project with a lot of Windows Forms forms that, even though you can resize the form, the elements in the form don't scale.
How can I make the form elements (such as the datagridview, text area's, etc.) scale when the user changes the size of the form?
Nearly all the forms subclass from one specific form, so if there's something I can do in the base class, that'd be great.
You should set the Anchor and Dock properties on the controls in the forms.
The Anchor property controls which edges of a control are "bound" or "tied" to the corresponding edges of its form.
For example, if you set Anchor to Bottom, the distance between the control's bottom edge and the bottom of its parent will not change, so the control will move down as you resize the form.
If you set Anchor to Top | Bottom, the control will resize vertically as you resize the form.
To make a control resize with the form, set the Anchor to all four sides, or set Dock to Fill.
Use the Anchor and Dock properties.
Anchor allows you to pin specific sides of the control to the sides of the parent control.
Dock will bind the whole control to a side of the parent control or it can be set to fill the contents of the parent control.
You usually just need to set the Anchor to the bottom and right of the parent control but gets more difficult when you have controls side by side, then you need to manually resize the controls on the forms OnResize event to get them to scale naturally together.
Related
How do I make the widths and lengths of an object automatically resize?
What I mean by this is that I'm trying to make my design responsive. The problem is that when a user resizes my app, the objects don't fill the empty spaces that are created (E.g, a box has the same problem).. I'm using Visual Studio and I'm not sure if this is a property or a programming issue..
In winforms, controls have a property Dock. You can set it to Left, Right, Top, Bottom or Fill. If you set the Dock property for the various controls in your form, they will fill the available space whenever your form is resized.
Usually, the "main" control on your form will have a docking style of Fill, while the main menu toolbar will have Top, the status bar will have Bottom and so on. Play around with the Dock property until you get your form organized right.
You may also have controls that must keep a fixed size when their parent form is resized, but must align to one of the edges of the form. For this purpose, controls also have an Anchor property. Set it to Left, Right, Top or Bottom.
I have a form set up as shown in the picture below. The form simply contains a SplitContainer with two TreeViews in each of the panels, plus the label above the TreeView.
Here's a picture of the form that has not yet been resized:
Each TreeView is anchored to the Top and Left, and docked to the Bottom.
Each label is anchored to the Top and Left.
The SplitContainer is anchored to the Bottom, Left, and Right.
The above settings allow me to resize the TreeViews equally when the form is resized. However, when I resize the form's height, the labels (and of course the TreeViews as well) are pushed out of the form view, as shown in this picture:
How can I prevent the elements from being pushed past the title bar? Preferrably without the use of a SizeChanged event. I have tried adding padding to the form, as well as trying different docking/anchor modes, but I have been unable to restrict this.
Perform the following steps in order:
Either anchor the SplitContainer to all 4 sides or dock-fill it.
Place the labels on the panels. Make them smaller than the panels, in order to be sure that they really become child controls of the panels (and not of the form). Set their Dock property to Top.
Place the TreeViews on the panel. It is important that this is done after you placed and docked the labels! Same thing here: make them smaller than the panels. Then set their Dock property to Fill.
Note: you can either dock or anchor a control, but not both! The Anchor property is ignored if Dock is something else than None. An anchored edge keeps a constant distance to the side it is anchored to. If an edge is not anchored, the size of the control in this direction will remain unchanged. If two corresponding edges (e.g. left and right) are not anchored, then the control will be centered in this direction.
See: Manage WinForm controls using the Anchor and Dock properties
Set SplitContainer.Dock = DockStyle.Fill; if thats the only thing appearing on the form.
I am attempting to add three panels to a window using a Devexpress Docking manager and dockable panels. Here are the current results:
The three panels are placed and sized how I would like them however their contents will not correctly resize as I resize the window. This first image indicates this by the Picturebox that fails to fill the window. My current attempt to regulate this is: (Panel3 refers to a panel that contains pictureBox1. which in turn is contained by dp3.)
void dp3_SizeChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
panel3.Size = panel3.Parent.Size;
pictureBox1.Width = dp3.Width;
pictureBox1.Height = dp3.Height;
}
The Same is true for the Controls Window. I have controls that do not appear unless the window is grossly oversized.
The controls are contained in 4 seperate panels that are themselves contained in the dockable window.
How do I make things appear the correct size and location whendocking and resizing?
Go throught this DevX article - Designing Resizable Windows Forms in
Visual Studio .NET-2,
that i like most for understanding about layout in Winforms.
You should set the Anchor and Dock properties on the controls in the forms.
The Anchor property controls which edges of a control are "bound" or "tied" to the corresponding edges of its form.
For example, if you set Anchor to Bottom, the distance between the control's bottom edge and the bottom of its parent will not change, so the control will move down as you resize the form.
If you set Anchor to Top | Bottom, the control will resize vertically as you resize the form.
To make a control resize with the form, set the Anchor to all four sides, or set Dock to Fill.
You can set the control's Dock property to Fill. This will cause the control to fill it's parent container.
You may still need to write some code to handle laying out the child controls. You can either do this by handling the Resize event, or by using a container that supports resizing for you (such as FlowLayoutPanel or TableLayoutPanel).
Use your Control's Anchor property. You'll probably need to set it to all sides, Top, Bottom, Left, Right, if you want it to resize according to parent control in all four directions
If you want to Maintain the controls Aspect Ratio on Resize, You'll need to store off the aspect ratio somehow, whether it's something known to you at design time or if you just want to calculate it in the constructor of the form after InitializeComponent(). In your form's Resize event,
I'm new to Windows Forms in Visual Studio, and I am wondering how to automaticly resize controls to the window size.
Say, I have 2 controls in a panel, a List Box and a Button. I want the button to dock to the bottom, and I want the List Box to fit the rest of the space. when the window resizes, the button should be at the bottom (as expected with docking), and the list box should stretch down to the button.
Is there a way to do this without any code?
Thanks.
Dock is pretty easy to use, but I recommend using the Anchor properties instead. Resize your form to a reasonable size in the Designer. Then, place your controls to look the way you want. Then, decide which controls should resize with the form and set the Anchor property as follows:
If you want the control to resize with the form in width, set the Right anchor.
If you want to resize height, set the Bottom anchor.
If you want the control to stay right when the form resizes, unset the Left anchor.
If you want the control to stay bottom when the form resizes, unset the Top anchor.
The problem I have with Docks is that they sometimes act funny when controls are not declared in a specific order, and to get the effect you want, sometimes you have to create extraneous panels just to hold controls.
It really gets messy when you want to maintain the aspect ratio of each control. One way, which is not really up to the mark if you want to get into fixing the details, is to use TableLayoutPanel and use Dock and Anchor wisely to achieve what you want.
Use the dock and fill options on the controls. Look under properties for each object, and containers if they are in any.
You can use SplitContainer
Google for examples. Here is one
Try setting your ListBox's Dock property to Fill.
You'll need to watch for one thing though: by default the ListBox will size itself to display whole list items. If you resize the control so that it displays a partial item it will adjust itself so it will display a complete item. This can make the control appear to lose its 'Dock'ing behavior. The solution for this is to set the ListBox's IntegralHeight property to false, which specifies that the control not resize itself to fit complete items.
typically in java if you have a layout manager of somesort, when you resize the page then the components in that panel will resize accordingly. I think my app is missing some sort of layout manager to control resizing as at the moment everything is just static
Is there a way to make it resize on the changing of the form size? say the user makes the page bigger, then the componenets adjust and so on.
Thanks
.NET has layout managers as well.
Personally, I prefer the TableLayoutPanel for my WinForms apps.
Once you layout the Table (using a combination of static/dynamic sized rows/columns) you add your child controls to the table cells. Once you add your controls, you can dock or anchor the controls to the cell so that they are automatically adjusted when the window is re-sized.
Two main options:
Anchoring. Set your control to "anchor" to the sides of your form. This means that if the form resizes, the control will stay a constant distance from that side. So, if you anchor Top, Left and Right, then your control will stay in the same position, but resize horizontally with the width of the form. Play with it. It'll be obvious.
Docking. Set your control to "dock" to a side of the form, or the center. This is usually done with containers, and it will make the widget take up that entire portion of the form no matter how large it gets.
In Windows Forms you make use of the Control.Anchor property, which will cause the control to adjust accordingly when the window resizes.
To do this with windows forms you use the Anchor and Dock properties of the control
See this for a guide on how to use them