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).
Related
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.
So there's this tutorial about creating a diagram in WPF.
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/24681/WPF-Diagram-Designer-Part
I've read it, and still studying it to understand it completely.
At the end of this tutorial, you can basically add shapes, move/rotate/scale them, and since they are created in a vector form, they are keeping their resolutions, there are also connectors that can connect each shape with another.
My goal, since I need to create a simulator which shows how internet protocols are delivered, is to create a divided diagram in which Side A communicates with Side B. it could read an automata and simulate the transitions in the diagram.
I'm thinking of how to deliever this, and since I don't have a lot of knowledge in WPF, I wonder in which way should I implement it.
Should I create 2 different Canvases? or maybe dividing 1 canvas with two sides?
The main issue I'm dealing with, is that when a shape is being dragged to the end margin of the window, then the window allow me to slide it so I can see the rest of the field, this is being done by increasing the size of the Canvas, as seen in the Tutorial Part 1.
However, if my canvas is divided by two, and there's a border in the middle, how can I create two sliders for each of the sides?
I was wondering if you can give me any tips about how approaching this idea, since my knowledge in WPF is still very limited.
Here is my point of view, but it would be very useful if you would provide a more/less final sketch of your app. I recommend using Telerik AppMock but paint will also suffice ;).
From what I have understood you should need 3 canvases.
1-st is canvas on the left.
2-nd is canvas on the right.
3-rd is on top of both canvases.
When you want to drag an element, you must set opacity of the clicked element to be a bit transparent and leave it on its place(1st canvas), add copy of dragged element in to the 3rd canvas. When you do leftmousebuttonup(drop dragged item), you have to check where was it dropped and if it was droppend on the 2nd canvas you add it to this canvas. To position element on the canvas you can use Canvas.SetLeft and accordingly SetRight method.
You can put 1st and 2nd canvases into Grid. Even if Canvases will be bigger if Grid, view will be cut only to the size of the Grid.
Moreover, to allow canvases manipulation, add there (to the Grid) a scrollviewer which will Translate Transform the canvases given to their sizes.
Later, try to use MVVM pattern to fill your Canvases with data.
I would also suggest an ObservableColletion of drawable (you can use FrameworkElement as base class) and draggable objects. Different for every Canvas.
Good luck!
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).
I'm sort-of just nit picking here, but maybe there's a simple solution which will save me some time.
When I'm drawing my Winforms GUI in the designer, controls snap to certain points. I can align the baseline of the text of one control to that of another, I can align the left and/or top of one control to another, etc. This is all great.
What's great too, is that the controls snap to other controls spaced with their margins. This means that if I'm making a vertical array of TextBoxes, then I can have them equidistant in my GUI - it looks less messy.
However not everything snaps correctly, or at all. Say I have put in my TextBoxes and now I wish to reduce the width of my form so that there is no white space between the edges of the TextBoxes and the edge of the form. Additionally, I want the distance between the edge of the TextBoxes and the edge of the Form to be the same on the left as it is on the right. If I drag the right edge of the form to the left, towards the TextBoxes it will not snap. I'm left with either calculations to work out what the width should be, or a juggling act to gradually reduce the width until the TextBox is snapping to both the left of the right.
I'm not saying this process is particularly difficult or time consuming. It's just that if it were to snap, the whole process would be infinitely easier.
Is there a built-in option in VS2010, or perhaps an extension? Or maybe I'm just doing it wrong in the first place?
The snap lines in the designer work perfectly when moving or resizing any of the built-in controls. The only time that they don't work is when you are resizing the form itself.
I agree that it would be extremely convenient to have snap lines here, as well. I wish I knew of a way to enable this. But unfortunately, I don't believe that there is one.
The workarounds are either to calculate the proper size mathematically, or guess at resizing the form then check your work by dragging one of the controls (and using the snap lines that appear). I go through the same "juggling act" that you describe on an unfortunately regular basis.
Whenever a control needs to be positioned so that it "snaps" to a form edge I usually move (or resize) the controls to the correct size first, and then change the controls "Anchor" property of those controls to be anchored to the corresponding form edge (even if the form itself won't be allowed to resize).
That way whenever I resize the form, the controls position relative to that form remains the same, simply resizing or moving the control as required (depending on the Anchor property chosen).
I completely agree that the ability to "snap" the form to controls when resizing the form would be extremely useful, but its normally possible to work-around using the anchor property in this way - the times when its doesn't work (such as when a form consists entirely of a column of text-boxes is a fixed height), I'm afraid you need to resort to calculations, but I find that most of my dialogs are resizable.
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.