I've been working on a small program which gets a list of url's from the web server ( latest forum topics ) and warns the user whenever a new topic is created.
So the main form of my program have a list of buttons. Each button has the text of the forum topic and extra information below. Opens the browser with the topics url when user presses.
The problem is, creating buttons for every topic doesn't feel right. I'm sure there is a better way to create a user interface for this program. I tried listview but I need space for some extra information so one line and one text-size isn't good for it.
edit: I'm sorry, it's a windows form app.
Try ObjectListView. Here's what can be done with it:
(source: sourceforge.net)
For this sort of thing I would look at WPF and style my own controls.
You can loop through them and add the buttons and labels programmatically. Placing them vertically below eachother is simple math.
Probably not best practice, but it has always worked for me.
Related
I've created a simple dialog here with a list of people. All I want to do is a few simple things which are rather trivial in winforms. However I'm struggling to grasp how to do this in wpf with an mvvm approach. Could someone help me out please.
When the user hits the Add New Person button, I want a dialog to appear where a user can type in their Name and either hit OK or Cancel. If the user hits OK, it appends the person to the list. (keep in mind i'll add more edting fields for the users to input, for example last name...)
When the users has a single item in the list selected, i want them to give them the ability to click an 'edit' button showing a dialog similar to the one in the previous step, pre populated with the selected items data, so a user can edit the properties. Then depending on if they hit OK or Cancel the changes are committed.
Dropbox solution: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8sjpabfod08yil5/AddDeleteItems_basic.zip?dl=
To create and display dialogs using MVVM, you'll want to implement a dialog service pattern to handle such requests. This service would be called from within your view model.
There is a really informative Code Project article about this very topic (Showing Dialogs When Using The MVVM Pattern. My advice would be to read that article and then look through the source files accompanying the article. This should provide you with a very good starting point to achieve your use cases (custom dialogs) and can also be used for displaying standard dialogs too (e.g. open file, save file, browse folder etc).
The service pattern isn't the only way to implement this, in the following article I show how to do it using the same data-driven mechanism used for regular windows:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/820324/Implementing-Dialog-Boxes-in-MVVM
I suggest this tutorial for you to get started. However, for the dialog Xceed library has some cool custom controls that may help you.
I have a Form which consists of two panels, for simplicity.
One panel consists of, for example, several Controls.
The other panel displays Help text associated with each of these Controls.
When user clicks on each Control in the first panel, the other panel of the application will display some Help text (NOT a separate Help dialog window).
In reality I have many Controls; thence, many different topics. Therefore, ideally, I have a single file that contains all the help topics.
Please let me know how I might do it in C#, Winform.
I'd done lots of searches. I'd found something very close but it wasn't implemented in C#. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/281/Embedding-an-HTML-Help-window-into-a-dialog
Help Class or HelpProvider won't do the job as it launches the Help text in a separate dialog outside my application.
Could someone please help. Thanks in advance.
Maybe I am oversimplifying or even misunderstanding what you are shooting for, but it sounds like you already have the solution (for the most part). Just put a label in the help panel that the other panel will update appropriately.
Pseudocode:
item in main panel is clicked
event method calls helpLabel.Text = "Help Stuff";
I am guessing I am misunderstanding this, though. Since you already have most of this.
Please forgive any silly words I may say. I am coming from a Actionscript3 background.
I am using "Visual C# 2010 Express".
I have a simple Form, in a WindowsForm Project, which currently holds just a Listbox. (Which I presume I will have to change to something else).
And I made myself a different display object (User Control) that is currently a Checkbox a title. (More will be added once I get over the hurdle below)
But I can't even get as far as Displaying the UserControl as a list.
I can't seem to find anywhere on the listbox to say "User this displayobject as the visual for listbox". I see tutorials saying "ItemsPanelTemplate" but I get error saying there is no such property for a Listbox.
I even tried making the Form in Design view and it is not in the list down the side of the GUI when I dragged as Listbox on screen.
Now I know how I would do this in pure Actionscript, but I dont know how to do this in Pure C#. Tutorials are not helping, as all the Microsoft site seems to try to give me is XAML (XML). and I am looking for C# code. So I have thrown in the towel and pleading for outside help.
Thank you for any help you can give.
It sounds like you want a list of items, each with a CheckBox and some descriptive text. Try using the CheckedListBox control. MSDN link.
This question also answers the question of how to do custom image drawing for each item in a ListBox. It may be helpful.
Edit after clarification:
Try embedding the UserControl in a ListView, rather than a ListBox.
References on embedding controls in ListViews:
C# listview - embedding controls
Adding button into a Listview in WinForms
You could also use a list of Panels, with each Panel hosting a UserControl.
C# List of Panels
But the real answer, as seen in the question's comments, is that Winforms doesn't have a convenient way to do this. This is a task much better suited to WPF.
You may check out freeware component Better ListView Express from ComponentOwl. It supports simple Details view without columns, two and three-state checkboxes, images and more...
They also offers full version with even more nice features like hierarchical and multi-line items.
I'm building a C# client app that allows a user to communicate with one or more existing users in a system via an email-like metaphor. I'd like to present the user with a text entry box that auto-completes on known email addresses, and allows multiple delimiter-separated addresses to be entered. Ideally, I'd also like the email addresses to turn into structured controls once they've been entered and recognized. Basically, I'm modeling the UI interaction for adding users after Facebook's model.
Are there any Windows Forms controls out there with the ability to do something like this? Is there any well-established terminology for a hybrid textbox / control list box (no, not a ComboBox) or something that I should be searching for?
Thanks,
-Patrick
I have had good luck in the past creating composite user-controls to provide specific functionality using native .NET Winforms controls. It works pretty good as long as there aren't too many of them, in which case things start to slow down.
In you case, and this is just off the top of my head, but, perhaps you could take a FlowLayoutPanel, a Button, and a Textbox which supports auto-complete and put these together to create a control that would provide the functionality you are looking for.
If there are no addresses selected in the control (e.g. in a List<string>), then the container (FlowLayoutPanel) would only display the TextBox. Once the user selected an entry, the control would automatically create a Button with the appropriate caption and insert it to the left in the FlowLayoutPanel. If the user removes an address he/she has already selected, simply remove its representation (the button) from the FlowLayoutPanel, and the TextBox can resize accordingly. There may be issues with getting the TextBox to fill up the remaining space (I can't remember how to do that), but you get the idea. The container does not have to be FlowLayoutPanel - you could use a Panel with Docked controls, or even a TableLayoutPanel for this.
A design as I described would allow the user to delete the address by clicking on the button. However, without some other visual cues, that isn't very intuitive or user-friendly, so I would consider making the "Button" be another composite control which contains a "prettied-up" label along with an tiny delete Button (X) to the right. For this you could use a Panel control and dock the X button to the right, and fill the Label on the left. You would provide public properties here as needed to control the text and provide an event handler or callback for the delete functionality.
Once the visual stuff is working, all that is left is to provide the appropriate Properties and Methods on the main control to allow it to interact as needed with outside code.
As a simple, "poor man's", implementation you could take a look at the AutoComplete* properties of the TextBox control. You could dynamically populate the AutoCompleteSource with your known addresses and when an entry matches, add to a separate, list-style control of your choice.
See this SO article for some interesting code snippets related to your question, and my suggested workaround.
Beyond the built-in AUtoComplete properties you're probably looking at having to purchase a 3rd party control from a tools vendor.
I've not seen anything like that before in WinForms. In WPF it would be another matter - if you can use that, maybe consider hosting a WPF control within your WinForms application instead?
I think you're trying to do something similar to this codeproject article: AutoComplete TextBox
And since you mention WPF in a comment, you also have this article: WPF AutoComplete Folder TextBox (should be easy enough to cut out the folder bit of the article I'd thought).
Well, there isn't such a control. If I were you, I'd create 2 textboxes to do the job. See, a normal textbox can easily be configured for autocomplete from a list, even dynamically; however, it accepts only one entry at a time.
So, I suggest you dedicate one textbox for autocomplete, and one for the addresses. So, whenever there is a qualified email address in the first textbox, and you click enter, the address gets added to the address textbox, and automatically add delimitation.
Then you need to handle the addresses in the address textbox as objects instead of characters. Code it in a way that when a user tries to delete a character in an address, the whole address is deleted.
This is the workaround I can think of. I'll help with the code if you give it a try.
EDIT:
So, I ended up making my own basic solution to this problem, and it can be found in my own answer to the question below. Or, here's a link.
Original Post
I'm doing some UI programming for a small .NET application. The application has some collections of items that need to be displayed in a grid sort of format (X columns by Y rows) and the grid elements need to be able to get dragged around to different grid locations, and possibly out of the grid all together.
The most comparable sort of UI design elements I can think of are the jQueryUI Draggables.
Do I have to roll my own or are there components people have already written to act like this? Even better, are there any free components? Or is there an easy way to do this that I just don't know about (don't do a lot of .NET UI programming..)
Also these "grid items" need to be able to include windows form components. The DataRepeater control is close to what I need, except it only supports horizontal or vertical alignments, not grids of items.
Here's a visual example of what I'm looking for:
I tried to stick with a halloween theme here.
Well I rolled my own solution and hosted it on GoogleCode:
draggableitemorderedpanel- A .NET Winforms Component... Kinda like jQuery UI Draggables (not really, maybe someday)
here's a screenshot:
(source: googlecode.com)
and another just resized:
(source: googlecode.com)
Hope this helps someone else out. Also it's super basic and pretty sucks right now but gets the job done.
Anyone that wants project access can have it.
The System.Windows.Forms.TableLayoutPanel control supports dragging and dropping, you just have to handle the right events. You could make your own "GridItem" user control, with the icon, caption, background color, etc displayed on a Panel, and then plop a bunch of them in the tablelayoutpanel, and wire up some event handlers. Here's something similar:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/Vsexpressvcs/thread/1cade626-b76d-40c5-9e5a-101cf2a5e412