I'm creating a custom installer and working on the progress bar. I have a timer function that increments the specified rectangle's Height property by +1.
statusBar->Height += 1;
if (statusBar->Height >= 285)
{
StatusBarTimer->Stop();
}
However, the origin point of the shape seems to be located in the top left of the shape, and therefore the Height acts opposite of its controls. I.E. the rectangle extends it's height the opposite direction of where I would like to.
customInstaller
(See arrowed object)
Is there a work-around for this, or better yet, is there a way to change the origin point of an image?
All common modern GUI toolkits position their controls top-down and left-right. The position you specify will be the top-left corner of the control, the size will extend downward and to the right.
If you want a control to grow upward, adjust the top and the height at the same time. Or use an existing progress bar control that supports being vertical.
Related
I am new to silver light and would like to understand a bit more from the pros. Let me tell you what I am trying to do. I am into photography and my goal is to create a web site that allows users to view their images and be able to rotate, zoom, crop, special effect etc. I have developed the web site that allows users to order pictures but now I want to start working on the actual picture/image manipulation. So for testing i put a canvas and a rectangle( with an image). Placed a slider and was able to link the slider to the rectangle. As i increase the slider the image gets larger. But I was kind of hoping as the image gets larger it does not surpass the boundries of the canvas. I assumed that is what it means by being a child of a canvas. Am i mistaken? If so how do you suggest me doing this? Remember I am very new to this and may be going about this very wrong.
Thanks!
Your are right. In Silverlight (like in WPF, WinForms etc.) gui-elements form a hierarchy of elements wherein controls can act either as parents or as children.
The reason why your rectangle surpasses the boundaries of it's container lies in the way controls are getting aligned. This depends on what kind of container you want to place your child into.
In a canvas for example you position the children with absolute measurements (left, top, height, width). In a self-organizing container like the StackPanel you choose an horizontal alignment (Left, HCenter, HStretch, Right) or a vertical alignment (Top, VCenter, VStretch, Bottom) which determines the childs behavior when you place it inside the parent. Furthermore you can specify the dimension of the child (Width, Height) and an optional margin which determines the gap between the Top, Right, Bottom and Left bound of your child to its enclosing parent.
But what ever container you choose it's inherent to it that you can let its children surpass its boundaries e.g. with a margin that is negative or greater than the container boundaries or simply by an child that is bigger in dimension that its container as you described the situation with your rectangle.
In your case I would consider working with the idea of clipping. Clipping simply means to
(1) define an geometrical area (in Silverlight and WPF it is a Path object) which lies over some graphical context (some section of your ui or your control etc).
(2) what lies inside the boundaries of this clipping area remains visible and everything else remains invisible.
So you can think of a clipping area as a window onto your screen which you use to look through.
When you are using Microsoft Blend this is easy to realize:
(1) Just use a geometrical shape like a Rectangle, a Circle or a custom Path.
(2) Place it somewhere upon your UI
(3) Right-click the shape, select "Path" and then "Make clipping Path"
(4) and voulà, you've just defined a clipping area which you can modify as you are used to modify controls.
Hope this gave you an idea how to deal with your problem.
cheers.
I'm working on a project that allows users to drawing something, and save it in the database.
Basically, the user draws on a canvas, the canvas is 5 time bigger than the screen size, and the canvas is still in the center of the screen (or the screen is in the center of the canvas).
In order to make it flexible for the canvas size (we want to change the size of the canvas in the future), we want to set the center of the canvas as the Origin Point, that is, (0, 0) is in the center of the canvas. So when the mouse clicks somewhere, the point I get is measured based on the center of the canvas.
Maybe you would say:
Canvas.RenderTransformOrigin = (.5,.5). But I'm not asking the rotating center, so it's not the solution.
Canvas.RenderTransform = TranslateTransform (Canvas.Width/2.0, Canvas.Height/2.0). But this just move all the objects on the canvas to the center.
You may also say that, why don't we just translate the MouseClick points with an offset Canvas.Width/2.0, Canvas.Height/2.0, and then translate them back when rendering. We could do that, but too much effort, because we have a lot of other operations to be implemented, so every time we have to translate back and forth.
It looks like you have thought of almost every possible approach to this problem, however, I will see if I can add just one more!
The Canvas properties, Left and Top, which dictate an elements position are attached properties. You could create your own attached properties, OffsetLeft, OffsetTop which allow you to position elements based on the origin you require. These would be simple to implement, when they are get / set, just handle their change event to set the respective Canvas attached properties.
I'm trying to retrieve the entire rectangle of a scrollable window using the WIN32 API. I thought that GetClientRect would return what I need, but that function appears to return only the current viewport. Is there a specific function call that returns the entire scrollable region as a RECT or must I call GetScrollRange to calculate the region myself?
It doesn't work like that. As far as Windows is concerned, a scrollable window isn't a small viewport onto a larger region whose dimensions you can set or retrieve, it's just a rectangle with a scroll bar control at the edge. It's up to you to determine the appearance of the scroll bar by calculating the portion of the notional region that is visible within the viewport provided by the window, and to paint the window contents accordingly.
It sounds as if that particular window is using virtual scrolling. Even GetScrollRange doesn't necessarily tell you the dimensions, because there's no requirement that a delta of 1 on the scrollbar equals 1 pixel, in fact in many cases it is one record, one row, etc.
Another thing to try is to enumerate all the child windows, and find the minimum and maximum x and y coordinates (don't forget to include the width and height of each child window). Of course this won't help if the content is directly drawn and not a hierarchy of windows.
In a simple code-only WPF application I'm writing, I would like to have a custom Canvas.
I've found questions similar to this one here in StackOverflow, but couldn't find exactly this one, nor a simple way to adapt another answer to my specific problem (please note that I have not much experience in WPF).
In my canvas, I'd like it to have the following properties:
the point (0, 0) is on the center of the Canvas;
the x-axis points to the right;
the y-axis points to the top;
the point (1, 0) is about 1 inch to the right of the origin; and
in every event, the position of the mouse is given in the coordinate system defined above.
In this answer, Ray Burns propose a very simple solution to my first 3 points. It is trivial to modify that code so that it deals with my point number 4 as well (change 1 and -1 in the RenderTransform to other constants).
However, that very simple and excellent solution for many problems is based on setting width and height to 0, and centering the canvas on its container. Therefore, there's no canvas to capture events like a click, so this solution won't handle my fifth property.
What's the easiest way to achieve this? Inherit from Panel and do everything by hand? Inherit from Canvas, intercept every event and modify the coordinates?
Put Canvas inside a Border. Border has mouse events. Another case is to place Border on the top of the Canvas.
I'm trying to modify the default graph viewer of the Graph# library because its user interface is awful (just try dragging a node outside of the boundaries, you'll see!)
The basic setup is this: there is a GraphCanvas control (inherited from Panel) which has children of Vertex and Edge control types. What I want to achieve is:
GraphCanvas has scroll bars if the contents do not fit in the screen;
GraphCanvas can also be scrolled by "dragging" it (just click on an empty space and drag);
GraphCanvas can be zoomed in and out (via CTRL+mouse wheel);
Vertices can be dragged around. If a vertex is dragged outside the current boundaries of GraphCanvas, the boundaries are increased. The scroll bars should reflect this, however the current viewport should not scroll away while the vertex is being dragged . The same goes if dragging a vertex reduces the boundaries of GraphCanvas - it should stay the same size until the drag operation is finished and resize only then. Automatically scrolling the viewport during a drag operation is awfully confusing and easily introduces dragging errors. See the original implementation if you want to know what I mean.
Although I've got a fair bit of experience with .NET, I'm still a complete beginner in WPF. My current attempt is (in the measure/arrange layout phase) to give each vertext the XY coordinate it desires (even if negative) and implement zooming/scrolling by handling mouse events on the GraphCanvas and modifying the RenderTransform property. Dragging just changes the XY coordinates on the specific vertex (probably triggering the re-layout of the whole thing which would be nice to avoid too). Scrollbars are implemented by placing the GraphCanvas inside a ScrollViewer and implementing IScrollInfo on the GraphCanvas.
Unfortunately there seems to be a problem: I can get mouse events on the GraphCanvas itself only if it has a background at the point. That would be OK, I want a white background anyway, but in the negative coordinates of the GraphCanvas it does not draw the background - and thus does not respond to mouse events.
I'm also wondering if I'm doing the Right Thing by allowing all my child controls (vertices and edges) to go into negative coordinates. How would you implement this?
Added: To clarify about the background problem check out the following screenshot:
(source: valts.21.lv)
What you see here is a simple Windows Forms form with a WPF Host control on it. That has a ScrollViewer in it, and the ScrollViewer has the GraphCanvas in it. The GraphCanvas contains 4 vertices and 6 edges.
The GraphCanvas is stretched to fill the ScrollViewer. But since some of the vertices are at negative coordinates, it has a RenderTransform applied which simply shifts everything to the right (TranslateTransform). It also has a white background brush.
Note the gray area on the left. That's still a part of the GraphCanvas, but the background brush somehow doesn't exted there. Also, if I left-click there with my mouse (not on a node, but on the gray area), I do NOT get an event. If I left-click on the white area, I get all events just fine.
Call CaptureMouse on canvas.mouseDown and ReleaseMouseCapture on mouse up. Also, if you set your canvas background to transparent it will still be hit testable
You can attach a 'Draggable' behavior to each element.