Automatic width for display of FlowDocument - wpf

In my application, I'm generating a FlowDocument with several paragraphs of text.
Using a FlowDocumentScrollViewer , I can display the document in my UI. If the document is too long for the available space, the FlowDocumentScrollViewer does it's job and introduces a vertical scrollbar. All good.
If I use a FlowDocumentPageViewer the response to show additional pages of text, also as designed.
However, what I want in my application is for the viewer to grow wider.
So, for a short document, the viewer is narrow (say, around 360 pixels with one column of text), but for a longer document the viewer is wider (say, around 720 pixels with two columns of text). An even longer document would expand to three columns, and so on.
I've seen a number of WinRT applications that do this kind of thing - The New Zealand Herald has one app. But, I'm working in regular WPF and have ended up stumped.
How can I display a FlowDocument so that it's all visible at once - no scrollbars, no pagination, just multiple columns of text stretching across?
Why do I want this? I'm showing several disparate pieces of information on a single page, and I want to have a single horizontal scrollbar for panning across the lot, not separate scrollbars for each piece. For example, I've got my ListBoxes working this way by using a WrapPanel as the ItemsPanelTemplate - when there are too many items for one column, another column opens up and the listbox gets wider to accomodate.

Related

How could I interactively create an invoice and preview it on WPF?

I'm creating a trial project wherein my window has two grids, left grid is sort of a table that has labels and textboxes each row and asks for a specific part of the invoice like item, name, address stuff like that and the right grid is to show a preview of the invoice that the left side is creating.
I thought about using a document viewer on the right side but I thought that anything I open there would be static and if I put values on the textboxes on the left grid, it wouldn't matter since I opened a standalone document to view on the right grid.
I thought about just creating a table out of the right grid and have the default values and populate the other ones when a user types something on the textbox and make it function as the preview but then I don't know how would I go about and printing it and also, it has about 45 rows which I couldn't fit in the grid without it being unreadable (because I had to cram 45 rows of data inside that small grid)
So is there a tool in the toolbox that could potentially create a interact-able grid? I tried the grid control but I can't seem to only make it show 4 columns because that's all I need, I don't want it to show E and the rest of the alphabet because I want it to resize accordingly with only 4 columns to make it more readable.
Oh and I also have devexpress installed so you guys could also recommend something I can use from there. Thank You.
I think this is the best solution since it does what I wanted it to do.
I created a scroll view and placed a grid inside it then set the length accordingly to show it in a reasonable size and let the scroll bar do its magic for me to see the rest of the grid without compromises of the content's size.

Silverlight (wp7)

Being new to silverlight I'm struggling to 'get going' with the following.
Basically I wish to create some form of grid like control (custom or user?).
The idea is similar to that of a planner. Along the top are times (set intervals). Downwards are subjects. Then over the grid like background rectangles (or something) indicate when the subject is planned for.
The actual design of the above is not the issue. i.e. a grid with ractangles overlaid. But my issue is I wish this grid to be scrolled up and down (with bounds fixing the top and bottom when the subject lines start and end). And also the grid to be scrolled left and right (with bounds fixing how far left and right it can scroll, current time & 3 days into future).
Based on the above needs, I don't wish to create a control which is very large, and just dragged into view (unless this is the only way?) but instead show the grid at a current time and when dragged dynamically load the next few hours worth of content, possibly with a few hours buffer.
The appearance I am seeking is it looking like it is one massive control, but truely its not, its dynamic.
Does this make sense? Am I worrying about nothing? Should I create a massive grid well into the future and then just handle the load of data dynamically over the top? Its just my concern if I want a grid 3 month into the future this would be massive and a waste of memory.
I'm struggling to find examples on the net, but feel this maybe to do with me not knowing what to search for. This isn't about getting a detailed answer and someone doing it for me, but instead about guidance pointing me in the right direction.
Many thanks
About the up-down scroll: you can simply put a grid containing your data in a ScrollViewer control - this will handle all the scrolling for you. Another solution would be using a listbox control - this is better if you use MVVM. You can bind it to a data source and set as data template a custom control.
For the left-right scroll. I'm thinking you could use gestures for this. Like - catch left-to-right and right-to-left flicks and change the data in your grid / listbox according to the gesture's direction. You could also place two buttons at the top of the grid to handle scrolling from one day to the other (just like in the calendar controls: gestures + buttons).

Issues with rendering a large tiled map in WPF

What is the best way to manage a very large amount of images (10,000+) in WPF? This is for a 2d tile map editor similar to this : http://www.mapeditor.org/ .
At the moment i have a canvas with all tiles as an image and a list box which contains the different images to choose from. Each tile is added to the canvas as children and then stored in a list for later access. You paint into the canvas by setting the Source property of a tile to the one selected in the listbox. It works well with around 50x50 tile maps but anything above that causes loading delays, in general slow application.
Any suggestions on this? Would QT maybe be more suited instead of wpf?
Thanks in advance
Check out Implementing virtualized panel series of articles.
Virtualized panels are efficient, because:
Only the displayed elements (and a few extra around the borders to enable smooth scrolling) are in the memory (and rendered).
Elements are reused, instead of being repeatedly created and discarded - an old cell is simply filled with new content (supplied with new DataContext) and used in new location.
You might also try to use WPF's DataGrid for this, it supports virtualization out of the box and is essentially what are you trying to do.
WPF is certainly able to do this, if implemented properly (if you can do that in JavaScript, you can certainly do it in WPF as well).

How to Print all the columns in silverlight datagrid

Im having 17 columns of datagrid in Silverlight. How can we print all columns in datagrid to print. Since there are more noumber of column, Im enabling Horizantal Scroolbar ,so tht user can scrollto lastcolumn easily.
During printing of silverligt datagrid, i could see contents which are shown in Silverlight Page , anything beyond scroll bar ,those images are cropped and not printed . Any solution for print all columns in datagrid even though beyond the screen width.
One more question, if i have datagrid with horizontal scrollbar enabled, datagrid.actualwidth always give 768 px but not from first column to last column width size
_mahens
If you can wait six months for Silverlight 5, then you can completely control the print layout and format it exactly the way you want. Until then I'm not sure if there is anything you can do.
You basically have 2 options here.
Shrink your datagrid using Scaling to make the whole grid fit on your page
Slice the grid into 2 grids (first half of the columns in the first grid, and the other half on the other), then print this as 2 separate pages. Of course you would have to take into account the height of the grid and print additional pages there as well if required.
Difficult? Yes, but achievable :)

Windows Forms (Or GUI development in general) advice

How should I develop a form that can resize nicely?
While that sounds like a simple question the problem I'm struggling with is the fact I'm reproducing an existing application I made in Swing several years back. Its built around a single form that hides/reveals panels as you select different options.
Its around 600 x 700 pixels wide say but its a fixed size window.
Is this good practice? The GUI works fine this way but if you look at other applications you can resize them easily. Granted some applications look stupid full size but should the option be there?
The main screen consists of about five buttons, when maximized this looks ridicilous, but at the same time if the form is resizable the moment you start resizing the form it becomes stupid.
I'm aware of layout managers and so forth so no need to tell me to check these out, my main problem is the fact I can produce an excellent fixed width application but that's about it.
Any advice/links for this?
Personally, I think fixed size forms are a horrible User Experience.
I always try to build mine so that they can be gracefully resized (even if they do look a little odd).
If you're using .NET for your WinForms development, you can easily use a table layout and then anchor your controls so that they resize politely.
A fixed size gui is generally a bad idea because most forms have a user interface element that can sensibly be resized.
First consider a form that only contains two buttons. (A silly form, yeah, but for the sake of discussion we'll assume that it's the right thing for the job) When sized initially in the right way (appropriately for localization, e.g.), there's no good reason to make the form resizable. If you enlarged or mazimized the form, you'd only make the area to click the button bigger, but you'd be clicking a smaller area than the button to resize it, so there's no reason. In this case, it doesn't make sense for the form to be resizable because there's no user-benefit for adding the extra control.
Now consider a form that contains a listview. There are clear usability benefits to making this form resizable in both dimensions. The listview may contain more items than can be shown in a smaller area, both horizontally and vertically, so it makes sense that this form be fully resizable to allow the user to display as much or as little of the data as they want.
Every form control implicitly has certain degrees of freedom either by constraint or by convention. Conventionally, buttons don't resize, so they have no degrees of freedom (even though they can resize). Listviews and listboxes have two degrees of freedom, horizontal to display more data per row and vertical to display more rows. Single line textboxes have one degree of freedom, horizontal. Because they're single line, they don't expand vertically, but they do expand horizontally.
These degrees of freedom help you determine the layout of your form. Form elements that have degrees of freedom should resize in the appropriate direction when the form is resized. I prefer to design my forms with only one control that has two degrees of freedom in an area where areas are typically separated via splitters. I prefer to avoid the explicit table layout panel unless there's a very specific need for it because it's easy to make a form overly complex when there's a table layout to work with. The anchors in WinForms provide an extremely powerful and flexible abstraction for control layout, however, so I strongly encourage their usage.
Aside from the layout panels (my favorite is the table layout), become familiar with the Anchor, Dock (more for the table layout), and MinimumSize properties. They do a lot of work for you when it comes to resizing forms.
Most of your forms will look goofy maximized but my general rules were these:
Buttons stay the same size
regardless of form size (no Top and
Bottom anchor; no Left and Right
anchor).
Buttons stay in the same place with
respect to a border (Anchor
combinations: {Left, Top}, {Left,
Bottom}, {Right, Top}, {Right,
Bottom})
Only the right-most textbox grows
when resizing (Anchor = Left and
Right).
Single multiline textboxes rule the form
(Anchor = Left, Right, Top, Bottom)
With multiple multiline textboxes, the lowest one rules the form.
MinimumSize is less that 640x480 whenever possible; 800x600 max.
The default size is the MinimumSize -- let the users make it bigger if they need to.

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