I have a series of forms that are inheriting control from a parent form. To manage space, I am trying to manoeuvre the controls around to make it a better layout on the child forms, however, certain controls appear to be "locked", indicated by a small lock symbol when the control is selected:
I am not sure what is causing this, as it only appears (in this case) to be happening to the labels, but not the text boxes. This is preventing me from editing any of the controls properties, (all of the properties window options have been disabled) meaning that I cannot change their locations. However this is not the case for the text boxes, or the groupboxes they came in.
How can I change this so that I can move them around?
Turns out that this is caused by the modifiers being set to "Private". Setting them to "Public" allows you to move them around on the child form freely.
Related
I understand that Databinding in Windows Forms only happens to visible controls.
In my code I have multiple tab pages with several controls bounded to settings in ApplicationSettings. Obviously not all controls are visible when the form is opened. The problem is, that these (hidden) controls actual setting is not updated from ApplicationSettings until the user changes at least one of them.
With this behavior I have trouble checking a control state, I simply can't trust it as it may not reflect the last saved state in ApplicationSettings.
What is the way to ensure all control's state is updated from ApplicationSettings ?
Thank you.
i have a main window that contains multiple UserControls, arranged as tab pages and tab groups (much like Visual Studio allows to have two or more editors visible at the same time).
I also have the possibility to open such an UserControl into a seperate floating window.
One of these UserControls contains simple form fields (e.g. text boxes). These text boxes are bounded with common databinding to an object / property. The binding mode is OnValidation (not on OnPropertyChanged).
When I switch the focus from this User Control inside the main window into another UserControl in the Main windows, the validation is automatically performed and the databinding is finised / the changed text will be set on the model object / property that is bounded to that text field.
But if I switch the focus to an UserControl which resides in another (floating) window, the databinding is not finished since no validation is performed.
I know that I can handle this manually by triggering ValidateChildren etc, but this seems to my the wrong way / is ugly.
Is there a "correct" / clean way to solve this issue? I want that the validation is performed as soon as the UserControl loses its focus or the window gets deactivated.
One information: On of my UserControls contains a TreeControl. If I edit a tree node label, and when I switch the focus to another (foating) window, the label edit is finished automatically. I want the corresponding behaviour for usual form fields regarding binding...
Thanks for help!
There is no automatic way to do this. From the point of view of the control, it still has the focus (if you click the title bar or Alt-tab back to the main window, you will notice that the focus remains in the same control). Its just that the form the control is on is not active. If you want it to save changes when your form is deactivated, you must manually trigger it. The best way to do that is probably to override the OnDeactivate method of the form.
protected override void OnDeactivate(EventArgs e)
{
base.OnDeactivate(e);
this.ValidateChildren();
}
First of all, I do not feel completely educated on how to navigate between multiple "pages" of a window.
For example, I have a Window called MainWindow. Inside of this, I have a header and a footer. In the middle is a panel which contains content.
This panel will originally contain content A. Upon clicking something in A, I want to remove A from view and show a new panel with content B. However, I want B to be shown in the same window (i.e., not hide the window and open a new one). Is hiding/showing these panels the correct way to go about it?
If using the panel switching mechanism is the correct way, then I am worried about resource management. If I set panel A to not be visible, and panel B to be visible, will I still have resources from both panels loaded? If I have a large number of panels to switch between, I would not want to load content for all of them, but rather the active one.
How would I go about making sure that I am correctly handling resources and memory between these different views?
If I have the completely wrong idea about how to switch views within a single window, please let me know.
Thanks.
Instead of toggling visibility off and on, you should put a contentControl and switch it's contents to different UserControls.
That way there's no reference to the UserControl that's offscreen, and you can handle memory issues better.
One alternative is to just use a single ContentPresenter, and put your individual "panels" in there, but only one at a time.
Instead of flipping visibility, you could use Data Binding to change the bound content within the ContentPresenter. This would only leave a single "view" in place at a time, preventing the neeed for "a large number" of panels to be loaded.
So I'm just starting out with WPF, and I'm really annoyed by the fact that if I lay two Grids on top of one another, the top Grid isn't opaque. It makes designing extremely annoying. Can this be turned off somehow?
I'm just building your standard Winforms STYLE application, but in WPF. I'm just trying to start bridging the gap here. In Winforms(and VB) you'd always have group boxes or something on your form, and then depending on some user context, one of those group boxes would be on top. Its how I've designed forms since time immemorial. One of two things must be true here:
A) This is not the recommended way to design Windows going forward with WPF, but I don't understand what you're supposed to do
B) There is some property to make the Grids opaque so I can build the Window in the style that I'm used to.
I'm fine with answers that solve either A or B. If I'm not doing things the right way because they've changed, then please enlighten me.
Update: So it turns out, I can make the grid opque by setting the background color, but now it seems like I'm locked into a White background as opposed to sticking with the system colors.
You could use SystemColors to make the control background colour match (rather than being white).
I don't understand why you want to put one grid on top of another though. In WPF you generally use a single grid to stack multiple visual elements within one region. Can you explain why you want to hide things in the background with foreground elements?
It sounds a little like you're implementing a tab control -- switching between pages of controls depending on focus. Have you experimented with the new TabControl?
I'm moving from WinForms to WPF development wherever possible and have found that in doing so it's taken some readjustment. WPF has a completely different way of laying things out and now that I'm more comfortable with it, I think it's superior. I'm guessing you just need to ride the learning curve a little longer.
Hope that helps.
EDIT: In response to your comment, I imagine you can have a tab control without tabs, though I haven't tried it myself (might be worthy of another question on SO). Tab controls are headered controls, meaning that they have a header item and a content item. In this case, the header is the tab button, the content is the page item. You can specify a ControlTemplate that details how these items should be displayed relative to one another.
Interestingly, many other types of common GUI element are also headered controls:
Menu items - The menu item text/icon is the header, and the optional submenu is the content
Tree view - Each node is the header, and optional children are within the content
Group box - The header is, well, the header and the content is, well, the content :)
Note that in the case of menu items and tree views, the type may recursively nest within itself. This is quite elegant and can give some wildly different presentation options over the same logical model with only changes to the control template.
For more information read about HeaderedContentControl and HeaderedItemsControl
You could use the following:
<Grid Background="{DynamicResource {x:Static SystemColors.WindowBrush}}">
<!-- content -->
</Grid>
This will respond to changes in the system colors on the fly (the DynamicResource does this).
The problem is fairly simple, but is best illustrated visually. Note that all screen shots are from the Visual Studio 2005 design surface. I've noticed no difference when I actually run the application.
Here is my user control (let's call this UC-1):
The buttons on the control are set to anchor to Bottom + Right.
Here is what it looks like when placed onto a particular parent user control (UC-A):
Please disregard the difference in colors and such. Some styling is done in the user control's constructor.
Notice the bottom of the control is getting clipped. The instance of the consumed control on the parent is set with a "FixedSingle" border. Notice also that the consumed control is taller than the original, indicating that the buttons bottom anchor settings are being respected, but are essentially overshooting where it should be.
To confirm this is definitely a problem on the parent control, notice another user control (UC-2) containing a data grid view when placed on the same parent:
Again, the instance of the consumed control is set with a "FixedSingle" border which helps illustrate the clipping. The datagrid is properly anchored to the Bottom Right. To reinforce the perplexity of this problem, here's the first user control (UC-1) when placed on a different parent user control (UC-B):
alt text http://i38.tinypic.com/2rnyjd0.png
Here's the second "consumed" control (UC-2) when consumed by a form:
Notice, no clipping this time.
I have spent many hours searching and experimenting to resolve this. I have exhausted the various settings of margins, padding, sizes (min/max), locations, anchors... etc. I can not for the life of me figure out why this one user control is causing child user controls to clip like this.
Another strange thing I noticed was that when I do an UNDO on the parent user control design surface (where the controls are misbehaving), the clipped user control instances actually shift location even though the undo action is unrelated to those controls. For example, if I make the main containing control larger, then undo, a couple of the child user controls jump up. They appear to move about as far as they are being clipped. Very suspicious.
Does anyone have any idea what is going on??
A very interesting problem!
Does your problem parent (UC-A) override any of the methods around sizing or client areas?
Or has UC-A got a negative value for the bottom value of Padding or Margin ?
Is there anything else docked at the bottom edge of UC-A? Perhaps, something that has a negative size?
Or, does UC-A set the constraints of its child controls? If the minimum height of the panel is forced too large, you would get this result.
Hope this is helpful! If not, is there any chance you post the source to UC-A ?
I was having the exact same problem and found your post while searching for a possible solution. Although I'm pretty sure that this is a bug in winforms, I found a bit of a workaround. Just put everything in your user control inside a panel, dock the panel to full, and do your anchoring inside the panel. This seems to alleviate the problem, although my button does tend up to show up at a slightly different size than it should in the parent control. Very weird. I compensated by making the button smaller in the designer, and it stretches wider by a few pixels in the parent control for some unknown reason. Hope this helps.
Assuming the parent control in question is not a standard .NET framework type, but a custom one, I'd guess that it is mixing up client and screen co-ordinates somewhere in it's logic. But that's just a guess.