Text length in a WinForms ToolTip - winforms

Question

how to set the max length of a text in a WinForms ToolTip?
I have a String with about 300 chars, but my ToolTip displays only 264 of them...
Greets,
Jürgen

Answer 1

You could add NewLine a few times in your ToolTip string like this so that it does not go all the way across the screen.
The string in this code is 434 characters long.
:-)
Just run this code to try it please:>>
Imports System.Environment
Public Class Form1
Friend WithEvents myToolTip As New ToolTip
Private Sub Form1_MouseHover(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.MouseHover
Dim someText As String = _
"Hello World!! Hi everyone!! Good day, good evening or goodnight, wherever you are in the world!! :-) :-D" & NewLine & _
"Hello World!! Hi everyone!! Good day, good evening or goodnight, wherever you are in the world!! :-) :-D" & NewLine & _
"Hello World!! Hi everyone!! Good day, good evening or goodnight, wherever you are in the world!! :-) :-D" & NewLine & _
"Hello World!! Hi everyone!! Good day, good evening or goodnight, wherever you are in the world!! :-) :-D"
Me.Text = someText.Length.ToString
myToolTip.Show(someText, Me, 5000)
End Sub
End Class

Answer 2

I had this same issue (it happened to be with a DataGridView cell) and the default ToolTip text (i.e. the text content of the cell) was indeed being truncated.
For me, it started working correctly when I set the ToolTip text explicitly (all of the answers I see do this). What I think is subtle is that the default ToolTip text uses the same cell content, only the default handler does truncate it as noted in the original question. By overriding the event and setting the ToolTip text (even though it's exactly the same cell text!) now the default length restriction seems to go away.
protected override void OnCellToolTipTextNeeded(DataGridViewCellToolTipTextNeededEventArgs e)
{
if((e.RowIndex >= 0) && (e.ColumnIndex >= 0))
{
// By setting this explicitly we can make the ToolTip length
// longer even though the content is exactly the same.
e.ToolTipText = this[e.ColumnIndex, e.RowIndex].Value.ToString();
}
base.OnCellToolTipTextNeeded(e);
}
Other controls will fire different events of course, but it should hold that if you put the text onto the tool tip yourself then you can circumvent the truncation that occurs with any default ToolTip.

Answer 3

I know this is an old question and I'm not sure if the following functionality existed at that time, but for those searching for this, I noticed that if the Tooltip text is very long, it may not get displayed at all, and after some trying, found that this helps:
// 999 = just an arbitrary number to test for possible very long text, may have to fiddle with that (maybe screen width) !
// 456 = also arbitrary, change to your liking !
// tooltip.GetToolTip((sender as ToolTip).Tag as Control) is because I have multiple controls using the same Tooltip, so I set the Tooltip.Tag to the control that will call Tooltip.Show(...). If you have 1 tooltip per control than just replace it with the control in question.
tooltip.Popup += (sender, e) =>
{
if (e.ToolTipSize.Width > 999)
{
Size s = TextRenderer.MeasureText(tooltip.GetToolTip((sender as ToolTip).Tag as Control), SystemFonts.SmallCaptionFont);
e.ToolTipSize = new Size(456, s.Height * 3); // * 3 turned out to work for SystemFonts.SmallCaptionFont
}
};