I have a project which requires that consists of two user controls, A and B.
User Control A (UC-A) appears in the background, the most distant
component of my window.
User Control B (UC-B) appears in the
foreground, overlaying User Control A. UC-B is partially transparent.
As is common with many UI designs currently (as of Aug. '18), I want it that UC-B causes the all elements behind it to blur (and only the elements behind it), as per the mocked up image here:
Please note, this mockup is not designed to imply that the picture of the sea shore is the Windows desktop, it was simply the first image I came across on my PC. The sea shore picture is representative of UC-A, and the panel labelled "My Panel" is representative of UC-B.
I know that it is very easy to apply a blur effect to an element and all of its children, but how can achieve the effect below, whereby the background is only blurred where the panel exists?
Please keep in mind that these are separate User Controls.
Windows already has functionality to do something similar on a Window level, but I can't see how to do it on a WPF UserControl level.
I have come across this answer, but this doesn't work for me as I am using different user controls. This answer was the closest one to my problem that I could find.
It seems you can do this with vanilla WPF with a bit of work, but far easier, this great library exists which handles exactly this scenario!
Related
I've thoroughly checked the custom controls topic, spent several hours looking into custom controls written by other people. I've written my own custom button, to feel it better. I've read all the google answers around the "why custom controls", "advanced custom controls examples" and such.
My question is, WHY?
Why would I (or anybody) go through 9 circles of hell to create his own custom control, when one can just adjust an existing control to his needs (using styles and templates). I actually didn't find any explanation on google, just tons of examples, mostly from people who sound even less educated than me.
I imagine there IS such need, when talking about some complicated DataGrid with, I don't know, every cell being a button or something (and still I believe I could do it with a regular DataGrid)... But I've not found anything more complex than a beautiful button. Is there nobody sharing a complicated code on the topic?
There are different levels of element customization in WPF, depending what class you extend from. Each has its own uses and is implemented differently. It is not clear from your question if you are asking about a specific type of control or about all of them in general. So, I will tell you what I think about different ones.
UIElement or FrameworkElement
Extending UIElement gives you the lowest level custom control where you have complete control over the layout and rendering. FrameworkElement is slightly higher level as it does most of the common layout stuff for you while also allowing you to override key parts of it. The main idea with these is that they do their own rendering rather than composing other elements together.
I have made a number of custom FrameworkElements over the years. One example is a ruler similar to one you might find in a program like Photoshop. It has a bunch of properties providing customization for how it is displayed as well as showing markers indicating mouse position relative to the ruler (and a number of other little optional features). I have used it in two different professional projects. I think the main benefit is that it is extremely easy to drop in and set properties/bindings on wherever desired. Build it once, use it over and over.
Control
Extending Control introduces the concept of compositing multiple elements/controls into one reusable component via control templates.
I have used this one less often, but still find it very valuable in the right circumstances. Again, the main benefit here is reusability. You create a control with properties that make sense for what you want to do, then hook up those properties to the properties of the controls in it's control template. Really, this is the same as applying a new template to an existing control, with the added feature of being able to define your own dependency properties. You also have the ability to perform custom logic in the control's code if you need to.
I may be misreading some of your text, but you seem to imply that making a custom control is considerably more difficult than making a control template for an existing control. I have found that the two are nearly identical in most cases using this approach, the only difference being whether you have a code behind you can use.
User Control
A user control is really only slightly different from a custom control practically speaking. Only, instead of defining a control template, you define the visual content directly.
This is probably the most common type of custom control. It is basically the standard method for making XAML based content in a WPF application. These can be reused like other controls, but are more suited for single use such as the content of a dialog or window or something else that is specific to a single application.
Some Other Control
You can also extend an existing control to add additional functionality to it. This way, you still get all the features the control offers and only have to implement the additional bit.
For example, I have a custom control called an AutoScrollRichTextBox that extends RichTextBox. So, it does everything a RichTextBox can do. It also has the ability to automatically scroll to the bottom when content is added to the text box (which it only does if the text box was already scrolled to the bottom before the addition content was added).
I could have implemented that feature as an attached property instead of an extension of the control (and maybe I should have), but it works, and I have used it in three different applications (as an output window and as a chat log). So, I am happy with it.
In the end, it really is just a matter of how self-contained, reusable, and easy to drop in you want a control to be. If there is already a control that does what you want, and you just want it to look different, then you should definitely use styles and templates to achieve that. However, if you want to make something that doesn't already exist, limiting yourself to using only styles and templates will make the implementation work harder and make the end result less reusable and more difficult to set up additional instances (unless all instances are identical).
The examples of making things like buttons that look different are not examples of what you should use a custom control for. They are just examples of how someone would go about making a custom control for the purpose of teaching the details of the process. If you actually want a customized button, just customize a button.
I have an application that present data in a summarized way. The structure of the view itself is not trivial, but not really complicated either (ie, a user control in a tems control, in a stackpanel,in a grid, etc). I want that when clicked the usercontrol pops out to the front plane and grows to show all the details (with an animation, like a plane flip or something alike).
Idealy, the user control should be duplicated so that the original one stays in place, and needs to stay in the application window boundaries. If modal, even better.
I'm looking for pointers on how to achieve this, not necessarily a detailed walkthrough. I'm not interested in commercial products, even if it means I need to reinvent the wheel. I had a look on many quite similar questions on SO, but haven't found anything useful so far.
Storyboard can get you the animation you need. Panel.ZIndex will allow you to set it on top of the other controls like you would in a web page. A sample of this with a Canvas can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wpfsdk/archive/2006/06/13/controlling-zorder-using-the-zindex-property.aspx
I have several Wpf pages in my project, these pages have different forms and ui control indide theme. The image below shows the mainWindow and there are two button.
I want to show a specific page when I click on + or Edit button using the Frame control which is highlighted.
apparenatly this woks:
Page1 me = new Page1();
mainFrame.Content = me;
But it has an IE navigation sound and a toolbar appears after going to page2.
any better way to show diffrent pages and not using a frame?
You may want to convert the Page into a UserControl. You can then put that control inside some other container, such as a Grid. You'll have to manually swap out the pages in the container when navigating, but it looks like you're doing that anyway.
The purpose of the Frame control is to allow navigation. If you don't want navigation, then don't use Frame. You can turn off the navigation toolbar, but that won't actually disable navigation - there are mouse buttons and keyboard shortcuts for navigating back.
If you just want to host a UI element without navigation, use something simpler, like a Border element - put the content in its Child property. You can change the Child as many times as you like at runtime.
I was able to set the frame control's NavigationUIVisibility to Hidden. This solved the problem for me. I am using Visual Studio 2010 though so it might not be applicable to older VS versions.
Ian Griffiths, what you suggest increases the workload on the developer substantially. And you are stepping outside of the underlying paradigm of XAML.
In my case I'm developing a game application and have chosen WPF as the UI platform as much as possible. For me that means a intro screen, character select, etc. The purpose of Pages is to encapsulate the navigational need of such an application.
I suspect your downvote is due to your statement "If you don't want navigation...". Upon re-reading the original posters question I see he does want navigation, he just wants it on his own terms. I would have voted you down too. YotaXP's solution neglects the issues with using a User Control, particularly if it may contain other User Controls. It looks like Chris Calvert came up with an actual solution to the poster's issue within the parameters of the problem.
I would be curios if I could override the navigation hotkeys and such within the existing paragimn but that's properly in its own thread.
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.
In order to make a convenient UI for an .Net 2.0 Winforms application I am working on, I have need for a control that I'm pretty sure goes beyond the "out of the box" behavior of any standard control. A mock-up of what I'm trying to achieve follows:
Mock up http://www.claware.com/images/temp/mockup.png
Essentially, this part of the application attempts to parse words into syllables from tribal languages (no dictionary to refer to; any and all unicode characters are possible.) By the time the user gets this far, he has already defined the vowels / consonants in his language and some other configuration. There is then an iterative process of (1) the application guesses which syllables exist in the language based on some rules, (2) the user refines the guesses, selecting the correct parsings or manually parsing a word, (3) the application "learns" from the user's feedback and makes smarter guesses, (4) repeat until the data is "good enough" to move on.
The control needs to present each word (the grey headers), then all the syllable break guesses (the white areas with dots separating the parts of words.) There is also a way to manually enter a parsing, which will display a text area and save button (at the bottom of the mockup.) When the user hovers over a guess, the background changes and "accept / reject" buttons appear. Clicking on the accept, or entering a manual parsing, removes the entire word from the list. Clicking the reject button removes just that item.
I'm by no means 100% sold on the formatting I have above, but I think you can get a general idea of the types of formatting and functional control I need. The control will also scroll vertically--there may be thousands of words initially.
My question for you experienced WinForms developers is: where to start? I would really, really like to stay within the .Net core framework and extend an existing control as opposed to a third-party control. (At the risk of starting a religious war: yes, I suffer from NIH-syndrome, but it's a conscious decision based on a lot of quick-fix solutions but long-term problems with 3rd party controls.) Where can I get the most "bang for my bucK" and the least reinventing the wheel? ListView? ListBox? ScrollableControl? Do I need to go all the way back to Control and paint everything manually? I appreciate any help that could be provided!
[Edit] Thanks everyone for the ideas. It seems like the most elegant solution for my purposes is to create a custom control consisting of a FlowLayoutPanel and a VScrollBar. The FlowLayoutPanel can contain instances of the custom controls used for each word. But the FlowLayoutPanel is virtual, i.e. it only contains those instances which are visible (and some "just out of scroll"). The VScrollBar events determine what needs to be loaded. A bit of code to write, but isn't too bad and seems to work well.
I would look at the TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel controls. These will let you organize a series of controls with moderate ease in a vertical fashion. I would then create a UserControl that consists of a label and 2 buttons. The UserControl will expose properties like Text and events that are exposed for the button clicks.. For each entry in the list, you will create an instance of the UserControl, assign the text value, and handle the click events. The instance will be placed in the Table/Flow panel in the correct order. Both of those layout panels do allow for inserting items between other items so you can add/remove items from the list dynamically.
Edit:
Given the length of what you are trying to render, I would consider using the DataGridView and do some custom rendering to make it perform how you want it to work. Using the rendering events of the DGV you can merge columns, change background colors (like highlighting the dark gray lines), turn on/off the buttons, and handle changing the grid into edit mode for your rows to allow modification or inserting of new values. This method would easily handle large datasets and you could bind directly to them very easily.
Well, this certainly looks like a candidate for a custom component that you should be creating yourself. You can create this using standard .Net drawing commands along with a text-box, and a regular button control.
Now you want to find out where to start.
Create a Windows Forms Control Library project.
Drop in the textbox and the button control.
The panel drawing code should preferably be done by code. This can be done using the regular GDI+ commands.
Edit:
Here's another idea, and one that I've practically used in my own project with great success.
You could use a web-browser control in the app, and show your data as html. You could update the source of the web-browser control based on the input in the textbox, and clicking on the links in the web browser control will give you the event that you can trap to do some action. Your CSS will work.
I used this technique to build the 'desktop' in an app I made called 'Correct Accounting Software'. People loved the desktop so much that it is one of the best loved features of the app.
Here's how I would do it:
Create a custom control. In this custom control, have a ListBox atop a LinkButton, and when the LinkButton is clicked you can make it give way to a TextBox. The ListBoxes will have the top row unselectable... you can probably get the rest from there. When you get your list of words, fill a Scrollable of some kind with one control for each word:
(foreach String word in words){
myScrollable.add(new MyComponent(word));
}
From there, I'm not sure what you want to do with the boxes or the data, but that's my initial idea on the UI setup.
Use the WebBrowser control and generate the HTML markup into it using DocumentStream or DocumentText.