I am working on a text editor that is based on RichEditBox. I have implemented functionality "Go to line" which eventually resolves to
TextPointer.Paragraph.BringIntoView();
Along with this I also set the caret position.
What I found out is that BringIntoView only works when I click on the RichEditBox first (focus it). Otherwise it seems to get ignored. I can see that the caret position has been adjusted by the code around BringIntoView though.
Does anybody know what is the reason/nature of that problem? How can I overcome it?
Found a workaround for this, not sure if it will work in a pure WPF environment, in my case I'm running WPF inside a mainly Windows Forms solution using WPF UserControls where needed.
Instead of invoking BringIntoFocus() immediately, defer it to a later moment by adding it to a queue that gets handled by a timer. For example:
System.Windows.Forms.Timer DeferredActionTimer = new System.Windows.Forms.Timer() { Interval = 200 };
Queue<Action> DeferredActions = new Queue<Action>();
void DeferredActionTimer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e) {
while(DeferredActions.Count > 0) {
Action act = DeferredActions.Dequeue();
act();
}
}
In your forms constructor, or in the OnLoad event add:
DeferredActionTimer.Tick += new EventHandler(DeferredActionTimer_Tick);
DeferredActionTimer.Enabled = true;
Finally, instead of calling TextPointer.Paragraph.BringIntoView(); directly, call it like this:
DeferredActions.Enqueue(() => TextPointer.Paragraph.BringIntoView());
Note that the Windows Forms timer kicks events off in the main thread (via the message pump loop). If you have to use another timer you need a bit of extra code. I'd recommend you to use System.Timers.Timer rather than the System.Threading.Timer (it's a little more thread-safe). You would also have to wrap the action in a Dispatcher.Invoke structure. In my case, the WinForms timer works like a charm.
Can't you just give the RichTextBox(?) focus first then, using Keyboard.Focus(richTextBox) or richTextBox.Focus()?
Related
I wanted to know if is there a way to do something (call function...) every frames in a WPF application, like "update()" in Unity, or like "Application.Idle += new EventHandler(Application_Idle)" in a Winform app ?
Thanks.
Is it related purely to UI rendering events? If so, try looking into CompositionTarget.Rendering event.
It sounds like you probably want to just use a Dispatcher timer. How do I create a timer in WPF?
The update time in unity is based on many factors but generally at 60 frames a second so the timer interval would be something like 17ms. However you should know wpf doesn't really have frames like unity so there is no update equivalent. It only updates the layout when something moves/added/changed or you call InvalidateLayout to force it to do so.
maybe you could structure your windows constructor like this as in pygame, though I'm not sure it will work
bool running = true;
public someWindow() {
// setup
running = true;
while (running) {
// do stuff
}
}
I'm working in .NET, C# to be specific, creating a Win Forms UserControl, which contains a WebBrowser control. The WebBrowser control hosts a page, which in turn uses a third-party javascript component. The problem I'm having is with invoking a javascript function to initialize the third-party javascript component and block the UI in the Windows Forms application until the component has been initialized, which the component notifies you of through an internal javascript event that it has.
Part of the problem is that the only way to change any configuration parameter of the third-party javascript component is to re-initialize it with the new configuration. So for example, if you want to make it read-only you have to re-initialize it with the read-only parameter.
I've got everything working in terms of being able to call the Document.InvokeScript and then in the web page call the UserControl method using window.external but the problem I'm having is how to block the UserControl code that makes the call to initialize the javascript component so that it waits and doesn't return control to the user until the initialization of the javascript component has been completed.
The reason I need it to work this way is because if I have a "Read-Only" checkbox on the form that changes the the ReadOnly property of the UserControl to control whether the javascript component shows the data as read-only and the user clicks that checkbox really quickly you will either get a javascript error or the checkbox will get out of sync with the actual read-only state of the javascript component. This seems to happen because the control hasn't re-initialized yet after it's configuration has changed and you're already trying to change it again.
I've spent hours and hours trying work out a way to make it work using everything from AutoResetEvent to Application.DoEvents and so on, but don't seem to be able to get it working.
The closest I've found is Invoke a script in WebBrowser, and wait for it to finish running (synchronized) but that uses features introduced in VS2012 (and I'm using VS2010) and I don't think it would work anyway as it's a bit different in that you're not waiting for a javascript event to fire.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The problem in the first place is the requirement to "block" the UI thread until some event has been fired. It's usually possible to re-factor the application to use asynchronous event handlers (with or without async/await), to yield execution control back to the message loop and avoid any blocking.
Now let's say, for some reason you cannot re-factor your code. In this case, you'd need a secondary modal message loop. You'd also need to disable the main UI while you're waiting for the event, to avoid nasty re-entrancy scenarios. The waiting itself should to be user-friendly (e.g., use the wait cursor or progress animation) and non-busy (avoid burning CPU cycles on a tight loop with DoEvents).
One way to do this is to use a modal dialog with a user-friendly message, which gets automatically dismissed when the desired JavaScript event/callback has occured. Here's a complete example:
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Windows.Forms;
namespace WbTest
{
[ComVisible(true)]
[ClassInterface(ClassInterfaceType.None)]
[ComDefaultInterface(typeof(IScripting))]
public partial class MainForm : Form, IScripting
{
WebBrowser _webBrowser;
Action _onScriptInitialized;
public MainForm()
{
InitializeComponent();
_webBrowser = new WebBrowser();
_webBrowser.Dock = DockStyle.Fill;
_webBrowser.ObjectForScripting = this;
this.Controls.Add(_webBrowser);
this.Shown += MainForm_Shown;
}
void MainForm_Shown(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
var dialog = new Form
{
Width = 100,
Height = 50,
StartPosition = FormStartPosition.CenterParent,
ShowIcon = false,
ShowInTaskbar = false,
ControlBox = false,
FormBorderStyle = FormBorderStyle.FixedSingle
};
dialog.Controls.Add(new Label { Text = "Please wait..." });
dialog.Load += (_, __) => _webBrowser.DocumentText =
"<script>setTimeout(function() { window.external.OnScriptInitialized}, 2000)</script>";
var canClose = false;
dialog.FormClosing += (_, args) =>
args.Cancel = !canClose;
_onScriptInitialized = () => { canClose = true; dialog.Close(); };
Application.UseWaitCursor = true;
try
{
dialog.ShowDialog();
}
finally
{
Application.UseWaitCursor = false;
}
MessageBox.Show("Initialized!");
}
// IScripting
public void OnScriptInitialized()
{
_onScriptInitialized();
}
}
[ComVisible(true)]
[InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIDispatch)]
public interface IScripting
{
void OnScriptInitialized();
}
}
Which looks like this:
Another option (a less user-friendly one) is to use something like WaitOneAndPump from here. You'd still need to take care about disabling the main UI and showing some kind of waiting feedback to the user.
Updated to address the comment. Is your WebBrowser actually a part of the UI and visible to the user? Should the user be able to interact with it? If so, you cannot use a secondary thread to execute JavaScript. You need to do it on the main thread and keep pumping messages, but WaitOne doesn't pump most of Windows messages (it only pumps a small fraction of them, related to COM). You might be able to use WaitOneAndPump which I mentioned above. You'd still need to disable the UI while waiting, to avoid re-entrancy.
Anyhow, that'd still be a kludge. You really shouldn't be blocking the execution just to keep the linear code flow. If you can't use async/await, you can always implement a simple state machine class and use callbacks to continue from where it was left. That's how it used to be before async/await.
Here is what my code looks like:
private void exportToExcelButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
txtBox.Clear();
txtBox.AppendText("Beginning Export...");
ExportExcel(txtBox);
txtBox.AppendText("Export complete...");
}
The problem I am having is that whenever the button is clicked (to execute the function above), only part of the current text in the TextBox (System.Windows.Forms.TextBox) is cleared, and replaced with the first line: "Beginning Export ...".
However once the function ExportExcel(txtBox) is done executing, then the entire text is replaced by the new one generated in ExportExcel(txtBox).
Inside ExportExcel(txtBox); I have several txtBox.AppendText() statements explaining to the user the actions being made.
I have tried clearing the text with txtBox.Text = String.Empty; and txtBox.Text = "";and neither have worked.
Let me know if anything needs to be clarified, thanks.
Looks like you're blocking the GUI thread, preventing the text box from redrawing itself. This is one reason why you shouldn't perform long-running tasks on the GUI thread. Use a background thread instead. That way you leave the GUI thread free to perform important operations like drawing, responding to mouse clicks, etc.
Have you tried the textBox.Refresh , before calling txtBox.AppendText("Beginning Export...").
The method invalidates the control.
On the other hand, if you use a background thread, then you should update the UI only by overriding the Progress Changed event. Background threads are not meant for updating user interfaces. Try searching for Worker threads and UI threads. They correlate to MFC, but the concept is the same.
Also keep in mind the cross thread calls.
I agree with dvnrrs. However if you are unable to do this, try calling txtBox.Refresh();after adding each line of text.
There is another method called Application.DoEvents(); that has a similar behavior, but its use is not recommended since it sort of short-circuits the normal application flow and can cause your application to fail unexpectedly or do strange things.
i have a winform application in which i have a lot of controls that needs continuos monitoring. For example there is a button and it should be enabled only when two other buttons are disabled, and they disable at separate instances. So what i am doing now is using a thread to monitor the two other buttons in a continuos while loop such as
while(true)
{
if(btn.enabled==false and btn1.enabled==false)
{
bt3.enabled==true
}
}
though it does what i need it seems wrong to me. Also its very expensive considering the number of threads i have to spawn to manage my controls, there are certain controls that needs to check five or six different things to before it can do an action and threading seems the only way possible to me.
Please tell me if there is any other way to do this
Not only is that inefficient, it is incorrect; you should never access a control's properties except from the UI thread, due to thread affinity. Setting properties (the enabled assignment) is especially bad, but reading them (the enabled check) is bad enough.
Rather than continuous monitoring, those forms should update themselves, based on event notifications. For example, by hooking EnabledChanged on the two buttons.
// (in the form initialization code)
btn.EnabledChanged += UpdateButtons;
btn1.EnabledChanged += UpdateButtons;
//...
private void UpdateButtons(object sender, EventArgs args)
{
bt3.Enabled = !btn.Enabled && !btn1.Enabled;
}
you could also (instead) do this at the code that causes the Enabled property to change.
So I've got some serious problems with removing a Control from a Form of my application. It's kinda messed up but I can't change anything. I have a form and I have a separated user Control. The control opens an exe file and shows a progress bar while loading it's bytes. And here comes the problem. I do all of it with a BackgroundWorker and when the worker_DoWorkerCompleted method is called the original form should show a MessageBox and remove the Control.
BackGround_Loader bgLoad = new BackGround_Loader();
bgLoad.Location = new Point(this.Width/2 - bgLoad.Width/2, this.Height/2 - bgLoad.Height/2);
this.Controls.Add(bgLoad);
bgLoad.BringToFront();
bgLoad.AddReferences(this.executableFile, this.SourceReader);
bgLoad.occuredEvent();
At first I set the control's location to be in the middle of the Form itself. Then I add the control to the form, and bring it to the front. After these I send the path of the executable and a RichTextBox's reference to this. With the occuredEvent I start the BackgroundWorker itself. And here comes my problem. I should show a MessageBox in the Form when the in the bgLoad the backgroundworker gets to the DoWorkerCompleted status. Kindly I have no idea how to do it. It works just perfect however the control stays in the middle of the form.
UI actions must be performed on the main UI thread. The events that get raised from the background worker thread are (obviously) in a different thread.
You need something like the following code:
private void backgroundWorker_DoWork(object sender, AlbumInfoEventArgs e)
{
// Check with an element on the form whether this is a cross thread call
if (dataGridView.InvokeRequired)
{
dataGridView.Invoke((MethodInvoker)delegate { AddToGrid(e.AlbumInfo); });
}
else
{
AddToGrid(e.AlbumInfo);
}
}
In this case AddToGrid is my method for adding a row to a DataGridView, but in your case it will be a method that does what you need to do.
Similarly for the backgroundWorker_RunWorkerCompleted method
See this MSDN example
I could find a way to solve the problem but I don't really like it. In the addReferences method I pass the Form itself and an object of the bgLoad class. Then in the RunWorkerCompleted I check if the control is on the form and if it is then I remove it.
bgLoad.AddReferences(this, bgLoad, this.executableFile, this.SourceReader);
...
private void worker_DoWorkerCompleted(object sender, DoWorkerEventArgs e) {
if(this.MainForm.Controls.Contains(this.Control) {
this.MainForm.Controls.Remove(this.Control);
}
}
Like this it works but it's awful for me.