I am trying to put together a windows forms control for an abacus simulator. I thought to just use trackbar controls stacked on top of each other with a max value of 1, but when I stack the controls on top of each other, the only thumb you can see after dragging them into a value of 1 is the top one (the other 4 are hidden by the top one). I thought maybe I could just change the background of the controls to transparent (found another post all about that and that didn't work). Basically I just want to customize a trackbar for stacking that is only clickable on the thumb and everything but the thumb is transparent. Can anyone give me a lead to follow?
Thanks
Related
I have a WinForms project based heavily on the DevExpress Windows Forms suite. I am working on a control that appears as below:
I use the term programme to differentiate between training programmes for people, from program, meaning computer program. In the image there are 3 ProgrammeGroup user controls. Each has a header, with 2 combos, and below that, a ProgrammeDetail user control with programme details.
When the top, left combo shows a value of Yes or blank, the programme details must be visible, otherwise not. When making a ProgrammeDetail control invisible, I also set its Height to zero, and the outer ProgrammeGroup control shrinks on auto-size.
However, if I set the Yes/No combo on the middle ProgrammeGroup to No, that
ProgrammeGroup shrinks, but leaves a gap between the header only middle control and the bottom control. This gap is visible in the following image:
How can I lay my ProgrammeGroup controls out so that if one shrinks in height, all those below it are moved up, meaning no empty gap. I am hoping that one of the many different panels in the DevExpress WinForms suite can help me do this, but I am stumped at finding one.
Solution to this problem is using FlowLayoutPanel which automatically align controls inside it next to each other.
The best way to adjust sizes and locations of child controls is to place them onto LayoutControl. This control is specially designed for such tasks. To hide unnecessary layout items/groups, use the BaseLayoutItem.Visibility property.
I should also note that LayoutControl is flexible and supports different modes including the Flow Layout Mode.
See Also:
Customization Form
I've a windows form containing a ribbon control with tabs, and some ToolStripEx controls. What I want is align some ToolStripEx controls to right of the windows form.
Any Ideas?
In our current implementation, ToolStripEx has been arranged one by one based on previous ToolStripEx position, therefore we do not have support to arrange it on the right side of the ToolStripTabItem.
So can you share the purpose of arranging the items on the right side of the window and also the items which you would like to place it on the right side? Based on your update, we will proceed further on this.
Regards,
Keerthana J
I'm sort-of just nit picking here, but maybe there's a simple solution which will save me some time.
When I'm drawing my Winforms GUI in the designer, controls snap to certain points. I can align the baseline of the text of one control to that of another, I can align the left and/or top of one control to another, etc. This is all great.
What's great too, is that the controls snap to other controls spaced with their margins. This means that if I'm making a vertical array of TextBoxes, then I can have them equidistant in my GUI - it looks less messy.
However not everything snaps correctly, or at all. Say I have put in my TextBoxes and now I wish to reduce the width of my form so that there is no white space between the edges of the TextBoxes and the edge of the form. Additionally, I want the distance between the edge of the TextBoxes and the edge of the Form to be the same on the left as it is on the right. If I drag the right edge of the form to the left, towards the TextBoxes it will not snap. I'm left with either calculations to work out what the width should be, or a juggling act to gradually reduce the width until the TextBox is snapping to both the left of the right.
I'm not saying this process is particularly difficult or time consuming. It's just that if it were to snap, the whole process would be infinitely easier.
Is there a built-in option in VS2010, or perhaps an extension? Or maybe I'm just doing it wrong in the first place?
The snap lines in the designer work perfectly when moving or resizing any of the built-in controls. The only time that they don't work is when you are resizing the form itself.
I agree that it would be extremely convenient to have snap lines here, as well. I wish I knew of a way to enable this. But unfortunately, I don't believe that there is one.
The workarounds are either to calculate the proper size mathematically, or guess at resizing the form then check your work by dragging one of the controls (and using the snap lines that appear). I go through the same "juggling act" that you describe on an unfortunately regular basis.
Whenever a control needs to be positioned so that it "snaps" to a form edge I usually move (or resize) the controls to the correct size first, and then change the controls "Anchor" property of those controls to be anchored to the corresponding form edge (even if the form itself won't be allowed to resize).
That way whenever I resize the form, the controls position relative to that form remains the same, simply resizing or moving the control as required (depending on the Anchor property chosen).
I completely agree that the ability to "snap" the form to controls when resizing the form would be extremely useful, but its normally possible to work-around using the anchor property in this way - the times when its doesn't work (such as when a form consists entirely of a column of text-boxes is a fixed height), I'm afraid you need to resort to calculations, but I find that most of my dialogs are resizable.
We have quite a complex WPF application (that I cannot show here) that somehow has the tiled background misaligned of one of its user controls. I was unable to reproduce this problem in a "clean" WPF project but will try to illustrate the problem in this picture:
(source: kintespace.com)
The gray area represents the user control and the black and red checks represents the tiled background inside the user control. The white background represents the window hosting the control. The VisualBrush is used here but the same problem comes with the DrawingBrush. I would prefer not to use the ImageBrush.
Can you open a "clean" WPF project and build something that will cause a tiled background to be misaligned like this?
You can do this if the layout root of the user control has a -10 left margin and a -10 top margin. the tiled backgoround in on the layout root of the usercontrol so, it looks like a alignment problem not a brush problem.
This problem is related to the tiled background cramming itself into the calculated height of the UserControl instance in the hosting Window. I am still unable to replicate this problem in a new project but it is "solved" (by stacking panels in the user control horizontally instead of vertically).
Here are two diagnostic techniques that can be useful in situations like yours:
Take your complex project, make a copy, and start tearing out large sections of code and XAML until the problem disappears. Then put the last section back and tear things out more gently. Repeat until you find the change that makes the difference.
Run the application, break where a local variable references your UserControl, then explore the visual tree just above and below your UserControl in the Locals or Watch window. Look at each Visual's internal properties VisualOffset, VisualTransform, and VisualContentBounds. These properties will usually clue you in to what property is being set incorrectly, and from there you can figure out why.
I am developing a form in .NET Compact Framework, which hosts a variable number of controls. Every control should have the same width as the form. When there are only a few controls, no vertical scrollbar appears. When there are more controls than they can fit in one form, a vertical scrollbar appears. The width of the controls should then be modified, so that no horizontal scrollbar appears.
What is the best way to achieve this? I am interested in a solution that will work in all platforms/screen sizes and that can support screen orientation changes.
If I get this right, at one point, both a vertical and horizontal scrollbar appear, and you want only the vertical scrollbar? Doesn't setting the Anchor of each control to "Top|Left|Right" solve this problem automatically?
If every control is to be the same width as the form, why not just Dock every control to Top (or Bottom)? It'll take care of the resizing for you then. It might not look very attractive however, so I suggest adding in some empty Panels (docked the same way) to be used as vertical spacers.
I did some quick testing, and it seems, when you add controls, the panel raises the resize event when the added control tiggers the scollbars to go visible. The annoying part is here that the resize event is triggered a couple of times during startup :(
But knowing the compact framework, this might be your best shot at handling this.
Normally on the full framework you could if the DisplayRectangle is bigger than the size of the panel, but no such thing exists on the cf.
Hope this is of some help, I'll see if I can find anything more in the morning.