So I have a form with a tabcontrol that takes up the entire view. I have 3 buttons that I have managed to get to be on top of this tabcontrol at all times. I have a 4th button that is always underneath the tab control. How do I get always on top like the others?
The order that controls, in the same container, appear (both visually and interactively) is determined by their "z-order". The term z-order is referring to the 3rd dimension, depth which is often referred to as the z axis.
In WinForms, the z-order is determined by the order in which controls are added to a ControlsCollection (i.e. Control.Controls).
You can see the z-order of controls (as well as container grouping) by opening up the "Document Outline view" when viewing you Form's designer view. This lists every control and every container. They are indented by their container and the z-order is the order they appear in. You can use the up and down buttons to move the selected item up or down in z-order.
Try right mouse clicking the TabControl (not the TabPage) and from the menu, select Send to Back
Related
For as long as I can recall, Visual Studio has had an integrate dialog that allows you to easily organize the tab order of your controls.
I've just created my first VS 2012 WinForms project, added all of my controls and went to find the Tab Indexing dialog, and it appears to be missing from Visual Studio.
I found this MSDN article which states that I can open this dialog by going to FORMAT>Tab order. The problem is that there is no Tab Order option on my FORMAT menu. Alternatively, the documentation states th at Ctrl+D should open this dialog. It doesn't.
Another alternative is to select the VIEW>Tab Order menu option. This method causes Tab Index boxes to hover over your controls. You can subsequently click on your controls, one at a time, in the order in which you want them to tab, to set the tab order.
This isn't acceptable because my form contains numerous panels and group boxes that cover one another. It is impossible for me to click-through my controls because many of them are no longer visible in the designer.
Is there an easy way for me to setup the tab order of my controls like there previously use to be within older versions of Visual Studio?
It is still available, you just need to add it back to the View menu. Tools + Customize, Commands tab, Menu bar = View. Select the menu item in Controls where you want to insert it, say the bottom one. Then Add Command, Category = View, Commands = Tab Order.
Your memory of this command does sound a bit hazy, it was never on the Format menu and its never been a dialog. If you want to put it on the Format menu then you can, just pick the Format menu bar in the Commands tab. You can't make it a dialog though, it numbers the controls in the designer view. Some odds that you actually remembered the View + Document Outline command.
Go to your alignment toolbar. At the end, click the tiny little "Add or Remove Buttons" down arrow. Click the "Add or Remove Buttons" button, and look towards the bottom of the list. You should see Tab Order. Click on that and it will be added to the alignment toolbar.
I found this to be very useful http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/csz6b8x8.aspx
It allows you to simply click on the various controls in the order that you want them to tab through. You do this while you are in the "Show tab order" mode as described above; the tip from Elton about adding the icon to a toolbar makes it easy to toggle the mode.
Ctrl-doubleclick the first control, then click subsequent controls, and press Enter to terminate. You can also start on the Nth control if you Ctrl-click the one before it, then click in order as normal.
(VS Express 2013)
The Tab order tool from the view menu disappears in some cases. For example, if you clikc a text box, then go to its properties, the tab order option will not show. You must select a control, then immediately go to the view menu and choose tab order.
You can click through your controls with the Document Outline view. If they all have the same TabIndex value, their Z-order will be used as tab order. The Z-order can be changed also with the Document Outline view.
My form is divided up into left and right panes, and the right pane is split into upper and lower panes:
AAAABBBB
AAAACCCC
There's a menu-strip at the top, below the title-bar and a status bar at the bottom:
menuStrip
AAAABBBB
AAAACCCC
status
Now I would like to add a toolStrip below the menuStrip. But when I do so, the toolStrip obscures the topmost content of the panes created using the splitContainer control. The Dock for the toolStrip = Top.
What am I doing wrong that the toolStrip doesn't simply get inserted between the menuStrip and the splitContainer control, pushing the splitContainer control down, so to speak?
You have to play with the BringToFront and SendToBack context menu items of those controls in the designer.
Drop the toolstrip container onto the form, then open the Document Outline window to re-arrange the controls into the correct hierarchy.
There are 2 simple ways of doing that:
Method 1
Open Document Outline window: View\Other windows\Document outline. Use buttons to place your control in the correct place
Method 2
Notice, that the current control in designer form is marked with some kind of focus rectangle.
You can easily navigate through current control parents using Esc key: once pressed, it can be used to go exactly one parent up in hierarchy.
Knowing the above just place your control in any place, cut it and then past it in the correct container. Repeat the step for any other control which is not in a good position
When you need to change the order of control in the same container use Bring To Front and Bring To Back from context menu
You have to set the splitcontainer's dock to none and instead use its anchor settings
I am curious to know how WPF figures out where the focus should be set when the user hits the TAB key. Thinking aloud, I feel:
It may be doing relative search on the UI and find the nearest control based on (x,y) location.
It could manually walk the logical sub-tree to look for the nearest control
Does it do it each time the TAB key is pressed ?
From WPFWiki:
Tab Navigation moves the focus through
controls in a logical sequence.
The default logical sequence is that
controls will be focused starting from
the first focusable child of the root
control (window, page, etc.). From
that point, the TabNavigation property
is considered, and the next control in
sequence is either the first focusable
descendent of the currently focused
control or the next focusable sibling.
The TabNavigation property of the
newly focused control is then
evaluated, and so on.
For the most part, the tab order (using the rule described above) will generally be from the top of your XAML file to the bottom.
Of course, this can be modified by setting KeyboardNavigation attached properties, such as IsTabStop, TabNavigation, TabIndex, etc.
Perhaps not the most technical answer (I don't know the actual guts of it), but that's the general idea...
I have a Silverlight form that contains a Stack Panel (orientation = vertical) with 10 rows. Each row contains a TextBlock and Textbox control except the last row has a TextBlock and Drowdown.. At the bottom of the control are two buttons. Previous & Continue.
There are 10 items in the Dropdown. When I select a value from the Dropdown, only two of the ten items are showing up. I believe that the remaining items aren't displying because there's some sort of clipping effect going on. Fair enough.
Does Silverlight allow the dropdown control to display upwards (instead of the default down direction)? Will I have to override some rendering capabiliities before the dropdown is rendered to the control or is there a property that allows me to accomplish this functionality?
The Silverlight ComboBox auto aligns the dropdown popup to always be visible whenever possible.
all Popup based controls (ComboBox, AutoCompleteBox, DatePicker and TimePicker) all have this feature enabled.
So if there's not enough screen real-estate below the ComboBox to show the dropdown popup, it'll show up above the control.
The combobox nesting in the visual tree should not affect the dropdown popup auto alignment. The internal Popup control (inside the ComboBox) ignores the Visual Tree and is nested "above" the visual tree.
If you have specific issues, please share minimal and relevant XAML. Since Keith is on this thread, I think it's safe to say he'll log a bug if needed.
I have a Windows Forms form in C#.
It is just like a regular Windows GUI application. However I am facing problems making the different components on the form resize themselves according to the window size. I mean I do not exactly know which property of the component is to be changed.
I have a tabPage in the form. The tabPage contains a splitcontainer which has 2 panels in it.
The left panel contains a treeView and the right panel has components like radio buttons, textboxes, comboBox and buttons,etc
When I run my application and resize the window (either by dragging a corner of the window or by hitting the maximize button on top right corner) the Windows Forms form and the tabPage expand but the split container doesn't. It stays where it was. Also I want to anchor the split container so that if I shrink my window, the split cointainer still remain on top left. I am sorry I cannot put screenshots here.
Just set the Anchor property of the SplitContainer to Top, Left, Right, Bottom. Or experiment setting the Dock property to Fill.
Have you tried using a TableLayoutPanel? Windows Forms doesn't have great layout support (compared with, say, Java and WPF) but TLP works reasonably well - until you find a situation where it doesn't do what you want, and then it's a pain :)