I want to understand its logic and to modify. This library is refactored based on the open source library. I'm not very familiar with customization. Of course, I'll study hard.
How is it created automatically?
How is it grouped with controls, and where are properties controlled?
The Library: https://github.com/kelicto/KeLi.TreeListViewKit
How to Test: create a new form and add a TreeListView control.
Not sure i fully understand the question but:
WindowsForms comes with a UI design via Visual Studio. Users drag controls from the designer onto the target form. Each component on the form is clickable, and there is an associated Properties window; this is where values for the properties can be altered. The code in InitializeComponent, whether it be a form, or a custom control is automatically generated by the forms designer. e.g.: when you first start up there is a blank small form with no components.
Drag a textbox control from the left hand side and place it on the form. The form now contains a textbox. Click on the textbox and you can alter the properties of the textbox (name, value, width, even event handlers). Each change will alter how InitializeComponent works.
So if you wanted this custom component on your form you will need to compile the assembly it belongs and add the assembly so it can be referenced by the forms designer. Once this is done your TreeView component will be available to be dragged & dropped onto the form. Do this and you will also be able to set its properties.
Even custom components come with a designer piece; so if you were designing a component from scratch you could still drag / drop components onto that custom control and same as a form the implementation of InitializeComponent will change according to the components dropped, and the properties you set (and their location, anchoring etc which can be done on the main forms designer). I wouldn't recommend building a WindowsForms app without the designer, not that it cannot be done; ultimately it's code at the end of the day. But it's a lot more awkward to do without the visual designer component.
Related
I am new to Windows Forms. I have a menu in a form. When a user selects a menu option I want to display some elements like a grid, treeview or a grouped UI elements.
What is the UI design pattern for displaying the view for the selected option? Load a user control dynamically in a pane? Show a form and hide a previous form? I am not using tab control. Content is displayed in a pane in the form. It's not a separate window.
I have searched high and low for sample applications and I couldn't find any which has a menu. Any ideas?
Constructing your form as needed in designer and then hiding and showing sounds like a reasonable approach.
I definitely would avoid dynamic content loading. In WinForms you are most likely relying on events to handle UI interaction. If loading/unloading controls dynamically you would have to take care of hooking/unhooking event handlers. It's easy to keep track of that when you have 3 controls each with single event. But if you have more controls and each controls has to take care of many events the loading/unloading and hooking/unhooking events is going to be error prone. Also unhooked event handlers will result in memory leaks. Other problem is that your complex controls will have many properties. All of them will have to be set up in code. You will end up with dozens of lines listing controls' properties and assigning values to them.
Hiding/showing doesn't expose you to these issues. You design your layout once in the designer. So your main code is not clattered with pure UI construction. Also, you do not create a new instance of a control when you show it so you can subscribe event handlers to events at design time and you do not have to worry about unhooking the handlers when hiding. You create one instance of a control and rely on this instance throughout application lifetime.
I need to create a basic user control with certain functionality (like dragging, minimizing and more..).
Now I need a bunch of other user controls to inherit from it and add their content.
I want an option to add new user controls that implements only a part of the base control and remains with the rest of the elements and functionality.
How can I bind a certain element (grid, stackpanael,.. whatever..) from the base user control to the new control? (without loading xaml in the code behind)
I basically want to "plant" a xaml element in a dedicated element on the base user control from a different user control.
If you write a custom control, one of the Controls you can use in the template is called a "ContentControl." Then when you use the Custom Control on a page, you can specify in xaml what the content is going to be. Thus you can put in a Grid, StackPanel, whatever in there.
But note that writing your own Custom Control is rarely done other than by 3rd party component vendors, as it requires a fairly deep knowledge of SL (for example, how to use Dependancy Properties). More commonly used is the "User Control" which is far easier to use and requires no such knowledge. I usually start by trying to accomplish what I need with a UserControl, and if I hit a roadblock, then switch over to a CustomControl.
But most of the existing controls already come with the functionality you describe - drag and drop, minimize etc. SL has a rich UI control set already, so a good place to start is by seeing if one of the existing controls has most of what you need, and then take it from there.
Greg
I created my own user controls that inherit from the standard .net controls (for example MyTextBox : TextBox). MyTextBox has within it some custom logic, and also sets some style properties (eg colour). I build the project that contains these controls, and they get added to my toolbox. I then drag them onto the windows form designer. The problem is that when I drag them, the windows form designer automatically includes the style definition for the control that i dragged. For example
this.myTextBox1.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Gray;
Now, if later on during development I decide to change the colour for all instance of MyTextBox in the solution from Gray to White, I cannot simply go to the MyTextBox control code, change it there and rebuild. The change will not be applied to existing text boxes, since this property will be overridden in the forms designer! What is the best approach to handle such cases?
you can control the designer code generation with an attribute ... http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.designerserializationvisibilityattribute.aspx
I was wondering how I am able to add one ToolTip control to the Form, and all the buttons get different texts? How does one object extends all the others, adding diferent things on each one? I don't know if I am being clear, If I don't, please let me know!
Thanks in advance!
I think you are looking for Extender Providers, where you can define new properties for other components.
This is a feature of Visual Studio designer. The ToolTip control does not actually add a property to other controls, but Visual Studio knows that when you have a ToolTip (or any other component that is an Extender Provider), it should add some other properties to property grid of the other controls. All this information is queried from the component that provides those properties (ToolTip). When you set the tooltip for button for example, Visual Studio calls the SetToolTip method of the ToolTip control, to inform it of the new value for the control.
Please refer to provided links for more information.
It's actually very simple.
Lets say you have a windows form with two controls a button and a label.
Now add a tool tip from toolbox to your form named tooltip1.
Now right click on button and go to properties, scroll down until you find tooltip on tooltip1. set the text to whatever you want. Now do the same for label.
Run the program and move the cursor over both the controls. you'll see respective tool tips.
How best can I create a Wizard control in WPF. My tak is; first I have a Wizard Controller UserControl, that contains two buttons, i.e. Back and Next, then I have start off with two other UserControls with forms for users to fill in and click next step to the next form etc... What I woud like to know is how I could inserted this usercontrols and validate my current object before going to the next form. What can I use to get the next and previous events or is there a better solution for this?
Im still learning WPF, and am working on WinForm project atm, so sorry for any WinForm references in this.
The wizard control could contain a reference to each usercontrol the wizard will display. The wizard will add all these controls to itsself controls.add(_userControl1). Each control has its visible property set to false.
The wizard could also contain a private enum with a list of control names, i.e.
private enum CurrentControl
{
_MyControl1,
_MyControl2,
_MyControl3
}
Wizard control keeps a reference to the current displayed control CurrentControl _currentControl = CurrentControl._MyControl1; Have a UpdateDisplay() method, which based on the _currentControl will only make that one control visible.
Then when you click on Prev/next buttons, it updates the _currentControl varible based on its current value, calls UpdateDisplay() to show th enext control.
This way you have a reference to all your user controls (and thus the data they contain), and thus you can validate the content and your wizard can go back and forward through them by using the buttons on the wizard, and the logic in the wizard showing and hiding the controls.
You might be interested in the EmailClient (ViewModel) sample application of the WPF Application Framework (WAF). It shows how to create a Wizard with the Model-View-ViewModel pattern and it contains validation logic which disables the Next button when the user input is not valid.