I want my users to be able to enter text in a Rich Text box and the RTF output be saved to the database.
Currently I have the RichTextBox bound to the field in the database, but it strips formatting when it's saved. How can I prevent this?
Also, how can I attach a formatting toolbox, (like what's in Wordpad) so my users can change the formatting?
And, last, I can't right click in the box or use Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V or anything like that, why is that? How can I fix it?
Ok, there are alot of questions there, I'll try to answer what I can.
1) Databinding is great for displaying data, but I personally NEVER use DataBinding for saving stuff back to the database. I've always found it to be "too much magic happening" and that I needed more control. Therefore, I would strongly suggest that you handle the insertion yourself (via LINQ to Sql or ADO.Net whatever). The RichTextBox control has an RTF property which you can get to do the insert manually into the database.
2) As for getting formatting buttons on top, it's not as simple as changing a property and be done with it. You'll have to implement that custom control yourself. Have a look at this CodeProject article. IT's in VB.NET, but maybe it'll give you some ideas: http://www.vbdotnetheaven.com/UploadFile/scottlysle/WordProcessor09122006234320PM/WordProcessor.aspx
3) Not quite sure...
For number 3, isn't there a property on the RichTextBox that enables the Context menu? I might've seen this on a different control but maybe it also has that property.
Related
I am using Visual Studio 2019 in order to create a Windows Form Application. I need some titles in my application, which means these strings will not be modified by the user.
For now, I created textboxes for these titles and made these textboxes "read-only". However, this does not satisfy my aesthetical expectations.
Therefore, I wonder if there is a way to add a string without adding a textbox, to the form. Is there a way?
Thanks in advance :)
Consider using a Label control rather than a TextBox.
The only time I would use a TextBox as a label is if I want the user to be able to copy the info, and I make it borderless, readonly and have the same colour as the background of the form. It's not superb UX though as there isn't anything that screams "you can highlight and copy this text" other than an I beam cursor, which is pretty much "mystery meat navigation" - better off putting a copy button next to it if you expect the user to copy info often
Why not use Label for your titles?
Since label, by default, cannot be modified by the user, thats what you want. Textbox is used for the user input, not for the titles.
Use Label control that is the right control to use for your requirement
I have two doubts about the autocomplete feature of textboxes in C#.
First, I want to display the full list, not only the ones that start with the given text, and secondly I want to prevent the auto-complete of specific options (some are category titles).
I've been checking the textbox properties and there's nothing related to it, so probably the main question could be, Is there a way to modify / override the textbox events in order to handle the auto-complete actions? (I don't know if it applies to show the full list too)
I assume you're asking about a winforms textbox, as I dont think the WPF textbox supports autocomplete at all.
The base TextBox class will not support doing what you want, so you could in theory attempt to override all of the functionality in the TextBox class to do what you want, but the better idea would be to create a new custom control that inherits from TextBoxBase and implement the autocomplete behavior the way you want it.
I'm not sure about displaying the full list (perhaps a combobox or similar is more suited to this?) but you can definitely do something like this to swap which list of possible items can be displayed.
Another option, though one I like less, is to remove items you don't want to display at a given time from the collection dynamically, like this: textBox.AutoCompleteCustomSource.Remove("ACategoryTitle")
I could foresee that approach having many problems with trying to rebuild the list constantly. I would probably create a subclass of AutoCompleteStringCollection that wraps some LINQ code to nicely select the union of some lists and not others to display in the textbox.
I decided to build my own autocomplete tool with the help of a simple listbox and events, then I could achieve what I was expecting..
The CodingGorilla's answer probably leads to a better solution if you want something more decent, in my case for speed reasons I decided to do it that way but I'll mark his answer as the accepted in order to help other people who have the same doubt and they could consider that point..
I would like to design one xml text editor which is based on normal text-box which implements all XML characteristics(i.e., it should implement intelligence to differentiate the text colors by node_name,attribute_name,attribute_value and it should check proper closing the tag).
Can any one give me the idea how I could process the each and every character entered by the user(normally we can call the TextBox1_TextChanged event after fully entered the text in text-box but I need to call this event each and every character entry)? I am good in C#, so that I have decided to transform the control to coding page because I already did one editor using console application which read the input character from the user and change the text color.
I might be wrong to approach this problem like this way so, give your suggestions, valuable reference links and ideas to accomplish this editor.
If you know any plugins to do this task please inform me
Thanks in Advance.
Regards,
--SJ
Use a Rich Text Box and handle the KeyDown event for character processing.
Rich Text Box will allow you to do syntax highlighting, text formatting, etc.
I would also validate entered xml for correctness and possibly highlight incorrect syntax to the user if validation fails.
All this is going to required effort, i am not aware of any QUICK solution. But using the basics i've suggested here, you could achieve what you require if you put in the effort.
The EditArea appears to have the features (and more) that you are looking for.
You could also check the list of Javascript base source code editors
at the moment I'm trying to get into Windows Store App Development and I'm stuck at some point.
I want to implement sort of a "markdown language" like the one on stackoverflow to highlight certain parts of text input.
Besides that I want to give the user the ability to use different font colors on his text.
The RichEditBox seems to be the ideal control for this task, but I don't know how to detect markup entering on the fly.
For example when the user enters **Test** the text should be transformed to Test immediately.
I have tried to approach this by listening to the "TextChanged" event and looking if the user enters **. If this is the case and if he entered the sequence ** already one time before, then I'm setting the character format of the text range from the end of the first annotation sequence (start marker) to the beginning of the second (close marker) annotation to bold.
But this solutions seems to be very quick and dirty.
My second thought was to use the WebView control to render the text after preprocessing it with "Markdown Sharp".
But then the user won't be able to edit text.
So I need to get some advice or tip on approaching this problem. I also looked into writing a custom RichEditBox control, but I have no experience in custom control development and there aren't that many resources on the web for Windows 8 development for now.
Thanks in advance.
As I see it, your problem is that you want to edit the "source" based on Markdown syntax AND show the formatted result in the same place. How would you revert Test to regular, as long as the asterisks are gone? If the answer is "using a button" then why not use the button to make it bold in first place?
However, you could do a hybrid thing: apply formatting in the source text, while maintaining the Markdown markup (not sure if this is entirely doable for all Markdown tricks, though). That is, **Test** would look in the source like **Test**. For the final, formatted result you would use a separate view, such as RichTextBlock.
In order to do the hybrid formatting, an option would be to have a background thread matching regularly the whole text against regular expressions specific to the Markdown syntax. For each match the corresponding text range would then be formatted accordingly.
I'm trying to learn WPF and was thinking about creating a simple IRC client. The most complicated part is to create the chat log. I want it to look more or less like the one in mIRC:
or irssi:
The important parts are that the text should be selectable, lines should wrap and it should be able to handle quite large logs.
The alternatives that I can come up with are:
StackPanel inside a ScrollViewer where each line is a row
ListView, since that seems more suitable for dynamic content/data binding.
Create an own control that does the rendering on its own.
Is there any WPF guru out there that has some ideas on which direction to take and where to start?
I suggest you start with a good object model independent of the UI, and then try a multi-line TextBox or a RichTextBox.
Whether these will suffice will depend on exactly how long you want the log to be able to get. If you run into performance issues, you may need to look at virtualization.
First of all, you should consider if you want to select only entire row (like in a listbox), or if you want to select certain characters from a row (like in a textbox).
In the first case, I think a ListView or even a ListBox should be enough, both of them support virtualization when bound to collection and there should be no problem with huge amounts of data. A stack panel inside a ScrollViewer is a little bit like reinventing the wheel for this case and creating a new control is not a very inspired approach in my opinion (as the functionality you want can be achieved with the existing controls, in WPF).
In the second case, if you want to select some text inside of a line, or if you want word wrapping for your longest lines in the log and want to select individual parts of the wrapped lines, then you need to use a control more oriented on displaying text. Kent already suggested a RichTextBox, I would add AvalonEdit control or even the WebBrowser control in which you directly modify its HTMLDocument.
I would suggest to use RichTextBox too, and store items in a log file or database, if you run into performance issues.
Another solution is to use the WPF WebBrowser control and modifiy its HTML content with:
webBrowser.NavigateToString("<HTML><H2><B>This page comes using String</B><P></P></H2></HTML>");
More information about using WebBrowser control