I'm a newbie. Designing a form that can be resized, and I want my textboxes, labels and buttons to resize with the form, can someone tell me how to do this?
It depends on the type of layout you need. The "basic tools" you have to do that are following properties: Anchor and Dock.
Anchor
With the Anchor property you "attach" a side of an element to a side of its container. For example if you place a button in the bottom-right corner of a window and you set "Bottom, Right" as Anchor then when you'll resize the form the button will keep its relative position to that corner.
Now imagine you place a multiline text-box in the form, resize as needed (for example 4 px from top, left and right border and 128 px height) and set the Anchor property to "Left, Top, Right". When you'll resize the form that control will keep its height but it'll resize to keep its margins (so if you'll make the form wider its width will be increased).
Dock
Dock is different. With docking you "say" to the Layout Manager to use all available space in one direction. For example if you set to Left then your control will keep its width but it'll use all the available height and its location will be most left as possible.
You may have more than one control docked in a container, imagine you have 5 textbox with Top docking inside a form. They'll be stacked to the top of the form using all the width (and resizing). Another example: a Top docked control (as a banner) and a "Fill" docked control (as main content). Remember that with docking the order of controls matters (if you first place the "Fill" control it'll use ALL the available space and the "Top" dock control will overlap).
Even more
Moreover you have some layout controls too (tables and stacks). They're really easy to use and a 30 minutes of "experiments" will clarify much better than a long text.
Related
I'm working on a Wizard-style application that has a panel on the right-hand side that changes size to reflect it's content (which would change to the content related to the current page). The panel consists of a ScrollViewer with a surrounding Rectangle that acts as a border. When the content within this panel is smaller than the available space given to it, the panel changes to the required size, aligned to the center of the available space. When the content within this panel is larger than the available space, the panel fills the space and the scrollbars show to scroll the content. The layout works like a charm and looks pretty good, but I want to do some animation when the content changes (as a result of the Wizard's page changing).
Basically, at the current time, changing the content within the panel instantaneously changes the width and height of the panel as required; however, it would be nice if I could make it so that the width and height change gradually (taking around half a second). The way I envision it is that the current content would fade out, then the panel would change size with the required animation, then the new content will fade in. I could figure out how to do this with a storyboard, but I just wondered if there was an existing control that does this?
In the Windows Forms world you can take a panel and set it's dock property to fill and so on with nested panels, when the user resizes the window the panels and nested panels automatically resize too. I want to achive something similar with Silverlight, here is my current structure.
Main
ScrollViewer // for body
UserControl
Grid
control
Scrollviewer // this is where my problem is
Control
The problem is I can set a size for the nested scroll viewer that looks good for 1024 resolution, but I also want to account for users that have larger resolution. If I leave it auto the content just stretches below the visible bottom line and defers to the top level ScrollViewer.
If I could achieve something analogous to how Windows Forms handles this with docking I think my problem would be solved. I must have a ScrollViewer for the nested panel and I want it to fill all visible space left. How Can I achieve this with SL4 or WPF?
[Edit]
Here is an illustration of what i'm after.
The top-level ScrollViewer allows its content to be as large as it needs to be, and adds scrollbars if that means they don't fit in the window. Its children no longer know or care how tall the window is; they just know that they've got as much space as they want.
So what is it that you want from your nested ScrollViewer? It's got all the space it needs, so it will grow to show all of its content -- there's nothing to restrict it to the height of the window. In fact, you added a top-level ScrollViewer, which specifically told it "don't restrict it to the height of the window".
If you want your inner ScrollViewer to be restricted to the window height, then take out the top-level ScrollViewer.
I want to be able to display a tooltip centered above my control.
I know how to customize the XAML used to display the tooltip using the TooltipService, however, the placement options the TooltipService makes available only allow you to specify top, bottom, left, right, etc. They don't let you specify an alignment once on the given side.
By simply using the TooltipService, selecting a placement of "Top" puts the tooltip above the control and has it aligned to the left side of the control. If there is not enough room for it to be aligned left, it moves it to be aligned on the right side of the control.
I want the tooltip to be centered on the top of the control. I don't want it to anchor to either the left or the right while on top.
Is this possible? How?
you should check out the TooltipService. MSDN documentation is here. and here is a (WPF) sample from CodeProject.
A quick shot: you could create your own TooltipService class to extend the possibilities of the existing one to manipulate a Tooltip instance.
Here you can find a nice class to help position a popup by specifying a list of preferred positions, like the TooltipService does for tooltip. You can specify a Top placement with Center HorizontalAlignment. I know this isn't a tooltip but I thought you could check it out and use it to create a BetterTooltipService.
In WPF, we are using a WebBrowser control to view HTML content. When we place the control on our window, it grows horizontally with the window as it grows/shrinks. However, we have not found a way to make the control grow vertically with the window. We are looking for some sample code that will allow the WebBrowser WPF control to grow both vertically and horizontally with the window.
With WPF and wanting to grow with the window, the magical starting point is to set the Margin to 0 and avoid setting width and height. (You can have margin equal to another number, but start with zero and see how it looks first!)
Another option is to use a dock panel with last child fill set to true, where the web browser control is the last element (as you read down the page - it doesn't have to be the last element in the rendered UI.
I have a dialog with column down the right side filled with buttons. The dialog is built with Windows Forms. I have a mockup at the following link:original dialog
(I would have included it but apparently i'm not allowed to use image tags)
I would like for the buttons in the right column to resize themselves to fill the remaining vertical space when the dialog resizes. It doesn't particularly matter to me whether or not buttons simply increase in size or whether the buttons remain the same size while the gaps between them increase. I'm simply want the buttons to go from the top to the bottom. (I have a mockup for this as well but apparenlty i can only include one link)
I've tried hosting the buttons in a FlowLayoutPanel but they do not increase as the dialog stretches, I only get whitespace at the bottom after I run out of buttons. I also tried a TableLayoutPanel and had the same result but I may have misused it. Does anyone have any ideas how I could accomplish this?
Thanks in advance,
Jeremy
To get you started. Use the TableLayoutPanel, set its Anchor property to top, bottom, left, and right. Set the rows and columns to percentages as needed. I suggest each control have it own cell. Note that each control in a "cell" can have its Dock and Anchor property set as needed.
You can do this with a TableLayoutPanel. Create a column for the buttons, with each button having it's own row / cell in the column. Set each row to be an even percentage for height (if there are 10 buttons, each row would be 10%), and dock the TableLayoutPanel to the right side of the screen. Then, put the buttons into their rows and set them to full docking. Then, when the dialog expands, the TableLayoutPanel will expand to fill the entire right side of the screen, each row will adjust proportionally, and each button would expand to fit the new row size.
You may have to adjust this a bit to fit your needs, especially in how it relates to the other content in the window.