Which property of visual control permits to maintain a constant distances from the edges of a parent form or container control when the parent is resized
It is the Margin property, Margin="0,10,0,25" (left, top, right, bottom).
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Is there any way in WPF to set X and Y coordinates of an image relative to it's parent grid?
Not using the setRow or setColumn, but X and Y.
This is not what the Grid control is for, that's what Canvas does. What you can do is add a Canvas control that spans all rows and columns of the grid, and then use the Canvas.X and Canvas.Y attributes to set the position.
Try Margin property to create space around element.
Margin can be set in formats "Left, Top, Right, Bottom" (e.g. Margin="10,20,10,20") or "LeftAndRight,TopAndBottom" (e.g. Margin="10,20", equal to previous example) or just one value for all sides (e.g. Margin="10"). X and Y will be Left and Top.
Panels (Grid, StackPanel, etc) respect Margin settings.
XAML designer in Visual Studio uses Margin,Width and Height to locate elements in a fixed positions, when drag and drop controls from Toolbox ("nails" them to one place, not very nice for adaptive desing).
Using Margin,Width and Height together is similar to using Location and Size to position WinForms controls
I have a custom Panel implementation that renders objects relative to a physical space (think like a floor plan). The panel allows the following actions:
Zoom in/out
Pan up/down/left/right
and more that isn't relevant to this question
The panel lives in with several other elements on screen, and I need to make sure the custom panel's graphics don't spill over the navigation and other controls.
The problem is this:
If the panel is set to clip, it clips the children before arranging them.
Let's say I have a circle in the floor plan and the user zooms in enough to make the circle bigger than the parent control. The panel applies clipping to the circle as if it were placed dead center, then arranges the circle where it is supposed to be. The end result is that the circle no longer looks like a circle and I have gaps in the image.
I need the clipping to be applied after arranging the elements, or only applied to the overall image as compiled by the children. How can I do this?
It turns out I had the opposite problem of the question the OP had in his letter to Dr. WPF where ClipToBounds = "Maybe"
If I override the GetLayoutClip() method in my control and return null, I essentially turn off clipping for the element. However, since ClipToBounds is still true for my panel, the rendered item doesn't spill over the rest of the application.
In the base class for all items that will be added to my custom panel I have this:
protected override Geometry GetLayoutClip(Size layoutSlotSize)
{
return null;
}
In my case this is exactly what I want. I honestly want my layout clip to be based on the parent panel and not the child size (with no sense of location within the panel).
A WPF application consists of a uniform grid of arbitrary size. Each cell in the grid contains a canvas. Each canvas is a target for a drag and drop operation.
When I drag another canvas and drop it onto a canvas inside the grid I want the top left corners of the dragged canvas(source) and the target canvas to align, essentially placing the source on top of the target. The behaviour I'm looking for is a snap-to-grid effect.
Currently when I use element.GetValue(Canvas.LeftProperty) the result in NaN. The problem is to determine the position of the corner for a canvas inside the grid, but relative to the entire window. I would prefer to use the grid, as it automatically resize as the window resize.
Is it possible to get the actual position of a canvas inside a grid even when the grid size changed or alternatively specify a canvas to be aligned to another canvas inside the grid?
This problem was solved by drawing each canvas onto another canvas by specifying the top and left properties of the canvas, I had to scratch the grid. I specified the position of every canvas by using
Canvas.SetLeft(Me, position.X)
Canvas.SetTop(Me, position.Y)
where Me is an instance of the canvas.
It is now easy to get the top and left properties of every canvas. The only problem now is I have to implement the resizing of every canvas manually.
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 would like use a panel whose children have coordinates specified as percentage of total panel's width/height. Moreover, I should be able to animate the coordinate property, for example to make a button move from 10% to 50% panel's width.
I've made 2 attempts:
Use a Grid and specify size as stars - this was not enough, because AFAIK by default WPF cannot animate distance properties specified by stars. I've found somewhere a custom class that enabled me to do so, it even worked, hovewer I consider that solution overly complicated an I am looking for something simpler.
Use a Canvas with fixed width and height and put it inside a Viewbox - this is a simple solution, but when resizing the Viewbox the whole content of Canvas is resized too. I want the content to have fixed size.
Is there a simple solution or should I implement my own panel (or maybe extend one of the existing ones, i.e. Canvas)?
Cheers!
I would:
subclass Canvas, perhaps calling it RelativeCanvas or RatioCanvas
add two attached properties: XRatio and YRatio
override ArrangeOverride and loop over all children. For each child, use their XRatio and YRatio along with the ActualWidth and ActualHeight of the RelativeCanvas to calculate and apply values for their Canvas.Left and Canvas.Top attached properties
You would use it as follows:
<local:RelativeCanvas>
<!-- the top-left of this button will be center of panel -->
<Button local:RelativeCanvas.XRatio="50" local:RelativeCanvas.YRatio="50"/>
</local:RelativeCanvas>
One thing you might like to add after you get that working is control over alignment. For example, I might to align the center of a control to the specified ratio, not its top-left corner.
There's one here: WPF Proportional Panel