I am trying to create an autocomplete textbox in WPF. What i found is http://weblogs.asp.net/okloeten/archive/2007/11/12/5088649.aspx. It seems quite close to what i needed. The only thing missing in this is when i press down arrow key after typing some characters it does not allow to me select an item from the narrowed list in dropdown.
Please give me some pointers how can i allow to select item using up/down keys after filtering list using some text input.
Regards.
There have been many implementations already for an autocompletebox. So as swiszcz stated, look for a working & well documented project. You need not spend time on trying to tweak some particular code for too long, when other options are available.
I have used an AutoCompleteBox implementation by Aviad P for many projects and found it easy enough to tweak and suite my needs. I feel the code is well documentated in the blog article itself. Also it uses a textbox & listbox (rather than a combobox) which is in my opinion, a better choice.
Related
I've not been doing much WinForms programming for the last few years, so I'm a bit rusty. Right now I'm having trouble with something pretty simple. I have one table of data that includes two foreign keys to two other tables. What I want to do is simply display a list box that shows a name field from the table and several text boxes below, which display the rest of the data in the row corresponding to what is selected in the listbox.
I tried simply setting the datasource on the listbox and then binding the detail textboxes to columns in the same datasource (using bindingsource), and that seemed to work fine. However, when setting the comboboxes up for the two foreign key columns, they did not reliably change to display the correct value as the user selected different items in the listbox. Additionally, when I made any changes in the detail textboxes, the HasChanges method on the dataset still returned false.
What do I need to do to get this to work correctly? Is there a good example out there somewhere? Google just seems to return a ton of results showing how to populate a simple listbox.
I saw this had been up for a few days so I'll provide what help I can...
I'm a bit rusty in that area as well. However, the place I always go back to for a refresher is the Forms over Data Video Series by Beth Massi. They are short, sweet and to the point. My guess is that you'll find what you need within the first few videos.
Disclaimer: The videos were done using VS2005. The fundamentals are solid though. While one or two minor things may have changed, WinForms databinding is pretty much the same as it has been for a while.
HTH and good luck!
OK this is a somewhat strange question but I've seen this often so I'm assuming it has a name and maybe some tutorials on how to do it.
Imagine two listboxes side by side with the first one full of items. You can select some items from the first press a button between them (often a arrow pointing towards the empty one) to select into the other. This usually is used when you are selecting a smaller SET from a larger one.
This is something you see on a regular basis and made me think it's supported in WPF in wome way.
I'm sure I could create it from scratch but don't wan't to bother if it's already available.
Anyone have any idea?
I'm not sure if this has a formal name, but I don't think it's supported in WPF as a native control, nor with the official Microsoft WPF Toolkit (which does have some interesting add-on controls, by the way). It wouldn't be too hard to build one with 2 ListBoxes and some buttons, as you say.
In our shop, we have a reusable (WinForms) control for this, and we call it a "double list". It's not a great name, but at least we know what it means.
I was thinking of ways to implement a generic View search. What I mean here is say a Window has many controls (including usercontrols,customcontrols, etc). I want to implement a generic search box on the top of window which searches any Text in the window and highlight them.
I wanted to know is there a generic way of doing this or has anyone tried such UI based search.
I was searching through internet and found some nice links like below::
http://khason.net/blog/search-and-highlight-any-text-on-wpf-rendered-page/ which says search and highlight any Text in WPF rendered page but it doesnt work when there are lot of UserControls and CustomControls.
I myself did some research and thought of going through the VisualTree,LogicalTree, etc but I did not find them satisfactory.
Some say do it using attached behaviors or by data binding but that also did not help me. Because even if i achieved search using this technique, the problem is highlighting. Say there are 4 TextBoxes having different background colors and I highlight background to Yellow when Text is found, I have no way of removing the highlighting when Text is not found because I don't know the previous background color of TextBox.
Ok , enough of my thoughts. I would like to simply accept I am going nowhere in my thoughts. So people I want some guidance in implementing UI search. Also if you people can tell me how I can make it generic, it will be useful!!
I am eager to find some solid (free, Open Source, or tutorial/example) code to make a WPF Combobox do autocomlete/autofilter as the user types. But everything I've tried so far has had some sort of problem...
A Reusable WPF Autocomplete TextBox came close, but I can't get it to work with more than one filter (more info here).
WPF autocomplete textbox/combobox doesn't work for me because it inherits from UserControl, and thus doesn't support the DataTemplates I need (for showing/selecting the value of one property for an object with multiple properties).
Automatically Filtering a ComboBox in WPF didn't work because it doesn't seem to ever find the EditableTextBox portion of the inherited ComboBox code (via (TextBox)base.GetTemplateChild("PART_EditableTextBox") which seems to always returns null).
Building a Filtered ComboBox for WPF just gets stuck in a refresh loop then overflows the stack after I type just a few letters.
Other things I've considered:
I know that Windows Forms' Combobox control has AutoCompleteMode and I could embed it in WPF, but I can't imagine it would play very well with my WPF data bindings.
Perhaps it is too complex and I need to simplify, maybe by building one-dimensional (single-property) ObservableCollections for the ComboBoxen... However, the challenge of applying multiple filters (one set by another control's value, and one from what the user is typing) to multiple controls using different views of the same DataSet would require a ridiculous amount of processing power to destroy and rebuild the list every time the user types a character!
So... I'm at wit's end. Any suggestions?
If your Combobox has some data source attached to it ,
just make
1-IsTextSearchEnabled = true.
2-IsEditable = true.
you are good to go
Try this one:
http://blogs.windowsclient.net/dragonz/archive/2010/02/23/autocomplete-textbox-control-for-wpf.aspx
In order to make a convenient UI for an .Net 2.0 Winforms application I am working on, I have need for a control that I'm pretty sure goes beyond the "out of the box" behavior of any standard control. A mock-up of what I'm trying to achieve follows:
Mock up http://www.claware.com/images/temp/mockup.png
Essentially, this part of the application attempts to parse words into syllables from tribal languages (no dictionary to refer to; any and all unicode characters are possible.) By the time the user gets this far, he has already defined the vowels / consonants in his language and some other configuration. There is then an iterative process of (1) the application guesses which syllables exist in the language based on some rules, (2) the user refines the guesses, selecting the correct parsings or manually parsing a word, (3) the application "learns" from the user's feedback and makes smarter guesses, (4) repeat until the data is "good enough" to move on.
The control needs to present each word (the grey headers), then all the syllable break guesses (the white areas with dots separating the parts of words.) There is also a way to manually enter a parsing, which will display a text area and save button (at the bottom of the mockup.) When the user hovers over a guess, the background changes and "accept / reject" buttons appear. Clicking on the accept, or entering a manual parsing, removes the entire word from the list. Clicking the reject button removes just that item.
I'm by no means 100% sold on the formatting I have above, but I think you can get a general idea of the types of formatting and functional control I need. The control will also scroll vertically--there may be thousands of words initially.
My question for you experienced WinForms developers is: where to start? I would really, really like to stay within the .Net core framework and extend an existing control as opposed to a third-party control. (At the risk of starting a religious war: yes, I suffer from NIH-syndrome, but it's a conscious decision based on a lot of quick-fix solutions but long-term problems with 3rd party controls.) Where can I get the most "bang for my bucK" and the least reinventing the wheel? ListView? ListBox? ScrollableControl? Do I need to go all the way back to Control and paint everything manually? I appreciate any help that could be provided!
[Edit] Thanks everyone for the ideas. It seems like the most elegant solution for my purposes is to create a custom control consisting of a FlowLayoutPanel and a VScrollBar. The FlowLayoutPanel can contain instances of the custom controls used for each word. But the FlowLayoutPanel is virtual, i.e. it only contains those instances which are visible (and some "just out of scroll"). The VScrollBar events determine what needs to be loaded. A bit of code to write, but isn't too bad and seems to work well.
I would look at the TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel controls. These will let you organize a series of controls with moderate ease in a vertical fashion. I would then create a UserControl that consists of a label and 2 buttons. The UserControl will expose properties like Text and events that are exposed for the button clicks.. For each entry in the list, you will create an instance of the UserControl, assign the text value, and handle the click events. The instance will be placed in the Table/Flow panel in the correct order. Both of those layout panels do allow for inserting items between other items so you can add/remove items from the list dynamically.
Edit:
Given the length of what you are trying to render, I would consider using the DataGridView and do some custom rendering to make it perform how you want it to work. Using the rendering events of the DGV you can merge columns, change background colors (like highlighting the dark gray lines), turn on/off the buttons, and handle changing the grid into edit mode for your rows to allow modification or inserting of new values. This method would easily handle large datasets and you could bind directly to them very easily.
Well, this certainly looks like a candidate for a custom component that you should be creating yourself. You can create this using standard .Net drawing commands along with a text-box, and a regular button control.
Now you want to find out where to start.
Create a Windows Forms Control Library project.
Drop in the textbox and the button control.
The panel drawing code should preferably be done by code. This can be done using the regular GDI+ commands.
Edit:
Here's another idea, and one that I've practically used in my own project with great success.
You could use a web-browser control in the app, and show your data as html. You could update the source of the web-browser control based on the input in the textbox, and clicking on the links in the web browser control will give you the event that you can trap to do some action. Your CSS will work.
I used this technique to build the 'desktop' in an app I made called 'Correct Accounting Software'. People loved the desktop so much that it is one of the best loved features of the app.
Here's how I would do it:
Create a custom control. In this custom control, have a ListBox atop a LinkButton, and when the LinkButton is clicked you can make it give way to a TextBox. The ListBoxes will have the top row unselectable... you can probably get the rest from there. When you get your list of words, fill a Scrollable of some kind with one control for each word:
(foreach String word in words){
myScrollable.add(new MyComponent(word));
}
From there, I'm not sure what you want to do with the boxes or the data, but that's my initial idea on the UI setup.
Use the WebBrowser control and generate the HTML markup into it using DocumentStream or DocumentText.