I'm looking to create a custom control which represents a hand.
This at needs to be bound to a datasource, then if a value/index value is present in the datasource which is representing a particular finger, the finger in question should appear green.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to start of with such control?
Basically I'm creating an app which records which fingers people where their rings and how many.
So graphics on each finger will show Green plus a number showing how many.
Rough Hand Design for User Control
Any help or direction will be mostly appreciative.
I'd recommend a usercontrol rather than custom control for this. As I think that link Clemens posted says, unless you really are going to switch out the template of the control then you don't need to do a custom control - which would be harder than a usercontrol.
This will have at least one dependency property you're going to bind your collection to. Make that an ObservableCollection. You can then pass say 0,1,0,2,0. If people change the rings they wear super dynamically you can set one of the collection to itself to cover change notification to the control.
Inside this I'd put a viewbox with a canvas in it.
Grab an outline of a hand from somewhere. You want to get a geometry out of this so look for a svg preferably.
Maybe https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/stop-hand-silhouette_57659
Then download and install InkScape.
Use this to trace bitmap if that's all you have then save as > xaml.
Open that file in notepad and you'll see a path with a set of sort of co-ordinates. Grab those. These can be used to define a geometry you use as a resource or directly used as the Data to a path.
I use such a resource for the email "icon" in this:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/32610.wpf-layout-lab.aspx
Or you could probably use one of the hand icons from syncfusion's metro studio ( free ) https://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/metrostudio
A Path can be used for your hand.
You then want 5 itemscontrols for your thumbs and fingers.
You could maybe make each of them a usercontrol as well but I'd try 5 controls for a first iteration.
They should template each item they're given into a green rectangle defined in itemtemplate.
Position 5 of them to taste on your hand's digits.
Bind their itemssources by index to your collection and use a converter to return the number of objects specified by that. So if it's 3 then you generate three objects.
That viewbox is there to scale everything. So you can size your control however you like and the rings will stay on the fingers.
Related
I need to develop a simple WPF application. In the UI window, There are Labels and Text Blocks towards the left and Buttons towards the right.
Figure 1
Based on a config setting (whether the user is left-handed or right-handed) I need to switch the controls, Buttons towards the left and Labels and Text Blocks towards the right.
Figure 2
Can you please recommend a good way to address this requirement?
Depends what the scope of the app is likely to be.
2 alternatives:
1)
I think it likely as an app grows that there will be more than just buttons.
I would probably build a usercontrol which encapsulates this behaviour for a label and control. The usercontrol uses a static to decide where the textblocks are positioned but would look something like the row edit control in this:
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/WPF-Entity-Framework-MVVM-78cdc204
Which is a usercontrol has a contentpresenter in it so you can put any control you like ( such as a button ) "in" it and set a dependency property for the label.
2)
Define 2 contentcontrol templates similar to the one used in this:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/28597.aspx
Put them in separate resource dictionaries and give them the same key.
Merge into application.current.resources the appropriate resource dictionary and hence style.
Seeing as this is an app setting, this is presumably a start up thing. People don't just change their "handedness" dynamically. So you could probably use these as staticresource. If they're realistically going to change at run time then I think this would be a bit more involved because you'd need to force re render of a view.
2 Templates are probably the right and stylish solution here as #RajN said.
Also you can define a grid with 2 columns and switch the property 'Grid.Column' of each controls accordingly
Maybe not the best way, but I managed to achieve this using a grid as per your suggestions. Thank you all for your valuable feedback.
I switched the columns and changed the widths accordingly.
if (AppSettings.IsLeft)
{
parentGrid.ColumnDefinitions[0].Width = new GridLength(400, GridUnitType.Pixel);
parentGrid.ColumnDefinitions[1].Width = new GridLength(1, GridUnitType.Star);
Grid.SetColumn(buttonGrid,0);
Grid.SetRow(buttonGrid,0);
Grid.SetColumn(contentGrid,1);
Grid.SetRow(contentGrid,0);
}
I'm using the Winforms PropertyGrid; the target of the SelectedObject includes a property of type Image. Everything is fine, except that with all items the same height, the image is too small to see properly. I'd like to have some control over the height of grid items such that the image can be displayed a bit larger. One other detail is that the SelectedObject of one PropertyGrid control may be assigned an object of any of a variety of different classes (which may or may not have image properties), so I'm hoping the height can be driven by data in the instance of the SelectedObject itself, rather than making it a static behavior of the control, although I'd settle for a custom attribute of the image property to make the item height at least class-specific if it can't be instance-specific.
How can I do this? Custom attribute? PropertyGrid event? Something else?
As Simon commented on your question, this is not possible to have a custom height for a GridItem.
You have 2 solutions to be able to show an image with a reasonable size:
You can code your own UITypeEditor. That way, the user would just click the down arrow and see a nicely sized image in the dropdown box.
Sorry for the plug but I think it directly answers your question: only 3rd party PropertyGrids may allow you to get variable size rows in the grid. Smart PropertyGrid.Net is one of them. You set a HeightMultiplier to the row so that it expands on let's say 4 rows. Then you code your own Look class that handles the drawing of the image the way you want in this space.
In a ListBox derived CustomControl I need to draw lines joining ListBoxItems that are layed out in a Canvas ItemsPanel.
I can achieve this by having class ListBoxLines : UIElement that does drawing in OnRender and then including that object in my ListBox ControlTemplate (but to do that I need to pipe the listbox contents to that class...)
<ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type p:NetworkVisualization}">
<Grid>
<p:ListBoxLines/>
<ItemsPresenter/>
</Grid>
</ControlTemplate>
Im just wondering if there is an easer way. Id really just like to add my draw code directly to my ListBox derived class but if I do that it seems to draw UNDER the listbox canvas white background.
Is there any way to to custom listbox drawing directly in my derived listbox class?
EDIT: The motivation for this question is a custom control to display nodes and linkstrengths of a wireless mesh network as in the image below:
EDIT: Additional issue: The OnRender code for ListBoxLines (the node links) is cached - how to force a redraw of this when a node is dragging? Ideally i want to build the cache with the all lines except for the currently dragging nodes lines and only redraw while dragging the lines to that node - not sure how to go about that.
Thanks for updating the question - from the original description we were on completely different pages.
Personally I would not implement a control like this, as I know from prior experience that it is not easy task. In the last two three occasions where I have needed charting I have used middle-ware solutions.
The argument for middleware is an easy case to make:
It will save you significant development time.
You will get results quicker, allowing you focus on your specific requirements.
Even if you choose a commercial provider, the time saved equates to money.
I recently evaluated charting middleware options for a project less than 5 months ago so I can tell your directly that for a WPF application the best libraries are:
Mindscape Diagrams 2 (Commercial)
Chart# (Codeplex Project, Microsoft Public License)
I have used both products for studio applications (internal, however released as if the users were clients).
...
Take a look at the above solutions, come back with further questions (if any) and then if you still want to write your own I will at the very least point you in the direction and resources to do.
A side note, you say that you like the selection part of the ListBox - did you know that the selection functionality is actually supplied by the Selector base class?
I need to create a WPF application which is maximized and which rotates amongst about 10 different screens. Each screen will take the entire area and show different content.
I already know how to maximize the window with
My question is what is best to put inside that window to achieve what I want?
Ideally I'd be able to have 10 different .xaml files and I just load one after the other to take the entire screen. I'm not sure the best approach for accomplishing this in WPF.
Thank you!
One quick way to do this is to use WPF's built in page navigation. By making your root window a NavigationWindow and each view a class derived from Page (similar to work with to a UserControl or Window) you can just set the NavigationWindow.Source to a relative URI that points to the page you want to show (like a web browser) and simply switch it as needed.
This sounds like a classic MVVM application, which is simply too much to put into detail here. Google MVVM or Model-View-ViewModel, or pick up the book Advanced MVVM by Josh Smith (widely regarded as an expert in such things).
However, this is basically what you are going to have:
One class, the ViewModel, is an abstraction of the data that you need to bind to
Your data Model
A View for each thing you want to show. A View is simply something that holds your UI, be it a DataTemplate or a UserControl. Each View is bound to the ViewModel
The Views are the things that will "rotate" (although rotate in WPF implies animation and/or transformation). How you switch between them is up to you, although it sounds almost like something that would be done with a DispatcherTimer and animation (i.e. like fading between pictures in a slideshow).
This question is really too broad for this forum - you will need to do quite a bit of research on WPF fundamentals before proceeding. Again, MVVM is a good direction to start.
EDIT: Something More Lowbrow, per OP Request
This is probably as simple was you can make it (and still create separate XAML files for each piece of content):
First, create 10 UserControls (XAML files) for the stuff you want to show.
Next, add an instance of each of these user controls to your main window. Set the Visibility of each of these to Collapsed, except the first one to show.
Put a "Next" button on the main window.
In the code-behind, handle the Click event for the Next button. In there, keep track of which UserControl is visible, by name. Set the one that is currently visible to Visibility.Collapsed, and set the next one that is supposed to be visible to Visibility.Visible.
This is certainly an ugly solution, and not very WPF-ish, but it will get the job done.
We just ported our WinForms application to WPF.
However, performance decreased dramatically.
We have a User Interface which consists of about 200 UserControl.
Each UserControl is defined by a DataGrid (= 10 columns and 3-15 rows) as well as a Panel which hosts about 10 Buttons.
They are all hosted in a ScrollViewer.
(Please don't recommend to change the UI. I don't have any influence on that. The customer wants to be able to scroll to any of those UserControls.)
Since we ported the whole application to WPF the startup time increased by 100%. Using WinForms we experienced startup times of 15sec whereas now, we are struggeling with 30s.
Do you have any recommandations or ideas how to improve the loading time of a UI which consists of identical UserControl where simply each UserControl is bound to a different ViewModel? (Maybe some fast cloning of the UserControl instances or sth similar?)
I am using static Resources whereever possible.
I avoid Grids and Auto Sizing whereever possible.
Hope someone can share some thoughts on that one.
Thanks,
TH
First find out what is responsible for the time.
Maybe it's the controls, and maybe not. Often it's data structure.
I use the random-pause method.
My final solution is a custom Virtual Panel which supports items of dynamic height.
See http://rhnatiuk.wordpress.com/2006/12/13/implementing-a-virtualized-panel-in-wpf/ on how to create virtual panels.
My UserControls support two states:
- Initial
- Loaded
When the application is in idle the virtual Panel asks the Controls to change to the "Loaded" state. This loads the expensive UserControl.
Like that everything is lazy loaded and as soon as the user stops scrolling the visible items are loaded.
Maybe that helps others that are in the same sitaution.
TH
Try only to create the controls which are visible at the time, use lazy loading.
Maybe SnapsToDevicePixels=true can also help a little bit.
Guys, I thought about the following implementation. If anyone has concerns please let me know:
I will implement my own virtualizing "StackPanel" which supports smooth scrolling.
For the moment we assume that the height of my UserControls is fixed. One page could possibly hold 5 UserControls.
I will then go ahead and cache the preceding as well as the proceeding page:
In memory I will always hold 15 UserControls.
The content of the ScrollViewer is a Canvas.
Locations of my UserControls are adjusted by setting Canvas.Top.
Let's say the current situation is the following:
User has scrolled to page 2.
That means UserControl 5-9 is visible. Now the user scrolls down.
As soon as UserControl 5 becomes invisible I take the UC of the top (in this case UserControl 0), change its ViewModel and adjust its Canvas.Top so that it now is the Control which is at the End of the ControlCollection.
If the user scrolls any further I take UC 1, change its ViewModel and adjust its Canvas.Top.
And so on.
Furthermore I will set Canvas.Height manually so that the ScrollViewer represents the ScrollBars in a correct way.
I hope my explanation is understandable :)
What do you think?
BR,
TH
I remember reading something about how each instance of a UserControl loads the resource dictionary. So if you have as many of these as you describe it can take a while to load those.
Unfortunately I can't find the link I remember, but here is one that might help:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/thread/c9b6aa9f-5a97-428c-8009-5cda432b820c
Another thing to try is to not use UserControls and instead use a DataTemplate to build your datagrids and buttons. Or make a custom control template for the datagrid that includes the buttons. Either one might be faster.
Hope this helps.