In our Silverlight page, I got comboboxes with different values. When selected, some values are too long to fit in the collapsed combobox.
I would like it to ellipsise ("System Use..." with three dots in the end).
In the dropdown the full name of the value can be seen, but when collapsed I would like the selected value to ellipsise. It feels like an obvious thing, as a drop down generally affords more space than the collapsed control, but still I cannot find an obvious way to do this.
You might want to take a look at http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/37503/Auto-Ellipsis.
It's similar to Zenexar's suggestion, uses a more efficient reduction algorithm in the general case. But it also writes about other types of 'ellipsing', which might also suit your needs perhaps.
Take the selected UIElement. Compare the RenderedWidth and RenderedHeight to the DesiredSize, the latter of which will be adjusted based on how the element is cut off. Repeatedly remove characters, append ellipsis, and invalidate the layout until the DesiredSize is smaller than or equal to the RenderedWidth/RenderedHeight
I think the best way would be to check the length of the selected item. If the length is more than a predetermined character length, cut off the rest and append three periods.
Related
I have a list of "Group" objects, each of which contains a list of "Option" objects, that show up as checkboxes. I want these to be displayed in a condensed fashion automatically without me having to layout the UI manually with something such as a Grid (which is what I've done in the past, and takes a lot of effort).
My groups have varying numbers of options, so the size of the container for the group is not the same across groups. I'm using a WrapPanel, but it leads to a fairly ugly design because each item in the WrapPanel appears to be slotted into the same size container:
I know I've done this in HTML/CSS/JS, where I can have it automatically condense the unused space. Is there something like this for WPF? My list of options is manually created, but I can add/remove options fairly easily in my code, so I would rather not have to manually recalculate things in a grid view.
I've looked at Is there any way to occupy blank space in WrapPanel automatically?, which sounds similar, but the answer to that question does not have an example and I could not figure out what I was actually supposed to change/use in the answer (my attempts using it did not make any difference at all to layout).
I guess you use Horizontal Orientation of WrapPanel, so every row have height as the maximum its element. Your problem isn't free space in the ends of rows, so the solution that you mentioned doesn't work for you. You can try to use Vertical orientation of WrapPanel, your wrappanel' elements look like they have similar width, possible it would look better.
I have a set of pages that look like this:
I have the content in grids with * Heights and Widths so the grid correctly scales when the entire window resizes. I would like the text to resize with the grid. Basically I would like the user to resize from this:
To this:
(preserving white space)
One way to do this would be to wrap the TextBlock in a ViewBox with margins on the right and bottom (for Grid.Row="3") to account for white space. But because I have several pages with different lengths and line counts I would have to set the margin specifically for each page otherwise the text sizes would differ on each page. Is there a better way to do this??
I don't think there is a better way to do this. There are different ways. But, I think it isn't just a matter of opinion that they would not be better.
Ways I can think of.
Render your text offscreen, rendertargetbitmap that so you've got a picture. Change your textblocks on screen to images and stretch them.
Or
Work out the size your text wants to be. Then do some calculation comes up with a different fontsize which is "better". This is a lot easier to write a description of than do.
In my opinion.
A viewbox is easier to implement. Way less error prone than calculations. Will give at least as good results as rendering to a picture.
I just want to add one more solution to the ones suggested by Andy, which is more of a scientific approach and takes a bit of practice to master.
Suppose you have to find a function F, which maps one or more variables to a desired single value. In your case that would be a function F, which takes aspect ratio of the window as input and outputs an appropriate font size.
How can you find such a function?
Well... you don't need to do any math yourself!
First, you need some data to begin with:
1. Resize the window randomly
2. Calculate aspect ration (X)
3. Pick an appropriate font size that looks good enough (Y)
4. Repeat the measurement 7 to 10 times (sorry data scientists)
5. Enter the data in Excel - one column for X and another one for Y
6. Insert a scatter chart
7. Choose the best trendline for your data, but avoid the polynomial one
8. Display the trendline equation and use the expression in your code
Now I should mention the pros and cons of this regression technique.
Pros:
1. It can solve a wide range of tricky problems:
"I use this 3rd party control, but when the text is too long it overlaps the title bar. How to trim it so it doesn't go beyond the top border?. Deadline is coming!"
2. Even if it doesn't solve the problem perfectly, the results are often acceptable
3. It takes minutes to try out unlike spending a day refreshing your math skills
Cons:
1. The biggest problem is that to keep it simple, you often lower the number of
variables by assuming some of them to be constant. In this post I've assumed that
the font family won't change for example, neither the font weight.
2. If any of the assumptions does not hold the final result could be even worse
This technique is fragile, but powerful. Use it as your last weapon and never leave magic expression like
fontSize = (int)(0.76 + 1.2 * aspectRation) without documenting how it came to be.
I have a report which displays customer address in multiple labels.
My customers use windowed envelopes for mailing. I need the address labels position to be configurable.
Something like, I'll have a database table which stores the Top/Left position of each label per customer. Based on this table, I need to position the address labels on my report.
I thought, it is doable by expressions, but Location property doesn't provides ability to set an expression and make the label's top and left dynamic.
Anybody, any ideas, on how to achieve this?
As you mentioned, you cannot set an expression for location property. I want to do this before but it seems that there is no solution for this work.
Sorry for the duplicate post
I had the same problem as you did. I got around the problem by using an old HTML trick. It involves using a transparent.gif in an image. You put your image (linked to the gif), then put your label on top. Using a parameter, you can toggle which item to appear by setting an expression in the hidden property for both controls.
As stated by others, it isn't supported. However, here are two ugly work around possible for basic reporting.
Work around with padding.
You can't set formula on the label's location, but you can use padding option instead.
So you can set the label as wide as the report and as tall as the region.
Also, set the label's horizontal alignment to "Left" and Vertical alignment to "Top".
Then, add a formula in left and top paddings to offset the text.
You can also achieve a right aligned offsetted label by setting the Horizontal alignment to "right" and using right padding instead of the left one to offset the field from the right. With the same recipe, you can offset from the bottom by using "bottom" vertical alignment and bottom padding.
The ugly side:
This method will create a mess in the report designer as all dynamic label will overlap each other and take all the space over static label. Also, please note that with this method, you won't be able to do fancy stuff like adding borders around the text and hyperlinks.
Work around with sub report.
If the number of different positions for the label(s) are really low. You can create a subreport for each possibility and use a formula to display the right subreport for the right case. Sadly, this doesn't work for labels in the header as subreport aren't allowed there.
No solution, as it is not supported!!!
From MS online community support...
"As far as I know, the position of the textbox in the report is static not dynamic, so it will not shift to left."
Reference: http://forums.asp.net/t/1433297.aspx
Ok I have the following problem in Silverlight. I have a control with 2 columns. On the left is a stack panel with line numbers and on the right is a textBox.
So when I write in textBox without wrapping turned on I can simply create the right count of numbers on the left, because I'm searching for '\r' in text.
But when I turn on wrapping I have no control over the count of lines in textBox.
Is there a way to get to that count? Or a way to know which line in textBox is going to wrap?
I hope you can understand what I'm trying to do.
There's one way to do this. You can simulate the word wrap operation in the background using a TextBlock. Here is a good link of the complete solution to this problem.
Extended TextBox control with MaxLines property
Is it not possible to create your items in code before they are passed to the view. This would enable you to bind a list of items to a listview and style them as you wish.
You need to user a value converter to count the number of char / lines and then trim that number if you wish to. Unless you use fixed width, you can't really count or calculte in advancet the size, since each application might be displayed differently (due to different sizing option).
There are two great sample chapters on Windows Phone and Silverlight for Windows Phone on the LearningWindosPhone.com site. There is great Windows Phone Trainng material , and dont forget the Windows Phone Develoeprs Blog
Yes there is a way to get the number of lines occupied by the text in the textbox. It's not that simple though 'coz you have to simulate the behavior of the word wrap in order to count/predict the number of lines generated as a result of a word wrap. I have the solution described here in detail.
I have a chart in WPF with a lot of labels. The text on these labels is dynamically loaded and subject to change. If I set the width just to auto, then these labels may overlap, which makes the text unreadable.
The chart support multiple sizes, so if it gets larger, then the bars are re sized and there is more space for text. Now I want to adjust the text to the space which is available. If it gets too small, I don't want to display the label anymore (a tooltip is available, so the user still gets the required information). Consider the string "Case 1, blah blah", there is probably not enough space to display the whole string, but just the first word. In this case I want the string to be "Case 1..", with .. indicating that there is some more information in the tooltip.
I can determine the length available for the string. But how can I determine the space a single letter will take? Of course I could also just re size the label, but then it would just cut off the string anywhere which is probably not helpful for the user (and looks ugly).
Any ideas?
If you can use TextBlocks instead of labels then they have a TextTrimming property which will do this for you to either the nearest character or the nearest word.
While you seem happy with the TextTrimming property, I'll edit this to add that the TextBox control has a GetRectFromCharacterIndex method that would allow you to find out the size on screen of one or more characters as long as the font settings matched your label. This might be useful if you wanted to trim at specific places in the label rather than the nearest character / word.
Not an expert in WPF, but I would think that you'll need to do this in code rather than XAML.
Start by obtaining the actual pixel width of the space available for the text.
Then look at the character set, dot pitch etc. utilised on the XAML front end and from there calculate the pixel width required per character.
You could also look at changing the character sizes as well as reducing the label length.