Has anybody out there had a situation where you needed to implement an "editable" ComboBox in Silverlight? My client wants a ComboBox in their UI that allows the user to place focus on the selection box and start typing to automatically pull up the desired value from the available items, rather than requiring use of the drop-down list.
This feature is available, I know, in several implementations from third parties. For example, you can make this happen fairly easily with Telerik's RadControls for Silverlight. However, my client is restricted to using the Silverlight 3 Toolkit, with no third-party tools or plug-ins.
Any suggestions for a quick, down-and-dirty implementation? Any guidance or links are appreciated!
Thanks,
Jeff
Okay, we had the same problem.
We went ahead and used the AutoCompleteBox from the Silverlight 3 tookit. Their implementation has a lot of things missing that we wanted. Because of these limitations, we created our own that inherited from it. It worked great and was very simple to do. Any tutorial for making your own control that inherits from another will help you.
Have fun. Since the toolkit is open source, you can always look at the code for guidance.
You can see the samples from the toolkit here: https://www.silverlight.net/content/samples/sl3/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html
Related
Has anyone tried or successfully implemented interactivity in the charts of the Silverlight Charting Toolkit? I want to grab a column for instance and move it up, so that the bound value is increased through my interaction with the chart.
I know there are commercial alternatives out there but really would like to know if it is possible with the toolkit or only achievable with disproportionate effort.
Thanks in advance.
This doesn't directly answer your question, but since the question has been sitting since March, I'll post it anyway.
Try Telerik's RadChart control. It supports a lot more than the standard stuff.
Telerik has a wide variety of interactive charts including this one that you can play around with. You may want to start with this page and click the "Other Chart Examples" drop down to see what they have to offer.
I want to create an automated UI test that will test my syncfusion grid. My problem is that the recorder can't recognize this control (or any syncfusion control). I've searched a lot in the internet but I couldn't find any extension so the recorder will recognize my controls (I'm using WinForms, not WPF!), or at least a way to extend the recorder abilities so syncfusion's controls will be recognized somehow.
Is there any easy way to extend the recorder? Or is there any extension available?
Or maybe can I get the grid object from the WinClient that the recorder generates?
Thanks!
Start your program. Run the Spy++ utility. Type Ctrl+F to start the finder tool and drag the bulls-eye onto your form. Ok, Synchronize and have a look-see at the windows that are visible in the tree. If you see regular Windows Forms controls, like a Button or a Label, but not any of the SyncFusion controls then you've probably found the source of the problem.
Component vendors that try to improve .NET controls typically do so by creating 'window-less' controls. They are not really controls, they don't derive from the Control class and don't have a Handle property. They use the surface of the parent to draw themselves, making them look just like controls. The .NET ToolStripItem classes do this. And this is also the approach WPF uses.
The big advantage is that they render quickly and support all kinds of effects that regular controls can't support, like transparency, rotation and anti-aliased window edges. The big disadvantage is that the kind of tool that you are using suddenly gets noddy and can't find the control back. Because they work by finding the Windows window back on your form, there is no window for them.
This is a hard problem to solve, the 'control' exists only in memory and there's no good way for a tool to find it back. Using Accessibility is about the only other way for such a tool to find a control that I can think of. Which would have to be implemented by the control vendor first, a somewhat obscure feature that gets easily overlooked. You really do need the help of the vendor to find a workaround for this. Shouldn't be a problem, that's why you paid them the big money.
This is Rajadurai from Syncfusion. Thank you for your interest in Syncfusion Products. To make UI Test Automation recognize Syncfusion grids(WinForms), some internal support need to be provided in grid whose implementation is in progress and about to be completed. Please submit an incident through Direct-Trac for any further related inquiries in the following link.
http://www.syncfusion.com/Account/Logon?ReturnUrl=%2fsupport%2fdirecttrac
You can also contact us through support#syncfusion.com. We are happy to assist you.
Regards,
Rajadurai
My company is going to development drag and drop feature in Silverlight. We are very new to Silverlight and just learnt SL for a week ago. But I believe the feature that my company wants can be done in Silverlight. The control about is about the time table in which the resource will be shifted around.
Here is the feature detail. We have one list box on left (resource list) and one table on the right. What we want to do is drag an item from the list onto the table then may have some data manipulation on table. I think it’s simple and but for me I don’t know how to create the table which is I think there is no built in control like this. Please take a look my screenshot below.
http://i.stack.imgur.com/QCaVX.jpg
My questions are:
How can we approach to achieve this
feature?
What is the best way to implement
this control?
How we can handle the event such as
drop, reload, bind and so on?
How can we select and drag cell on
table?
Yes, Silverlight can do that. It has drag-drop and rich support for creating custom user controls.
The Telerik RadControls for Silverlight have a control that does some of what you need. They also make source available.
You might want to research all the available third party controls first to save development cost.
There are too many questions in your question to answer. Best do your research and then ask specific questions.
The Telerik control is called RadScheduleView and can be seen here: http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#ScheduleView/FirstLook. It has nice performance and a lot of features.
We are also using Telerik RadScheduleView .It is simple and lot of demos for you to start.
Im working on a middle size project, using WPF. Need DataGrid, suitable for the client: fast, customizable, beautiful. Which component suite do you suggest from your practice?(for example Devexpress's, telerik's, Infragistics's and etc)
I have used Telerik data grid in the past and it seemed to have the least hastles for me compared to others I have had a look at.
However I can pretty much put my money on it that someone else would feel that Telerik's control wasn't great and that Infragistics was better etc. - so I suggest that you maybe download the trials and test them for your specific scenario.
"Fast, customizable, beautiful." - try Xceed's (I work there), there's a no-install XBAP demo. Also supports asynchronous data virtualization and smooth scrolling and other stuff no other datagrid does.
Xceed DataGrid for WPF main page
XBAP demos page
I've been evaluating Xceed for a few weeks now and while it is powerful it's dog slow when placed in a tab control switching between tabs. 30 seconds to open a tab on a large data set. The forum on their website seems to suggest this is a known problem without resolution. Shame as in other aspects it appears to do a good job.
Well we are considering to move from WinForms to WPF, what pitfalls does WPF have? And we got component one's flexgrid is there any wpf grid that has the same functions? one nice thing with it is that you can implement your own draw method for the cells... It can merge cells print and save to many file formats..
In general, WPF development is very different from WinForms. You should expect it will take some time to learn the new technology (or you might even need to hire new developers =)).
WPF approach is in many ways better than WinForms' one: check out styles and triggers, data binding, control templating, eventing model.
I would recommend you to start exploring it, but wait for the WPF 4 (and the boring MSDN page) to start the actual migration, because it is going to be even better and close some of the very annoying gaps.
First of all, WPF works pretty different from Windows Forms and likely requires a different approach on how to structure and design the application. At least it works way better if you do it the way it was conceived.
As for single Windows Forms controls, this shouldn't be a problem. There is a WindowsFormsHost which enables you to include Windows Forms controls in WPF.
The change from winforms to WPF is not a change I'd reccommend unless you have specific requirements which WPF fulfills - WPF is not intended to be a replacement, simply an alternative which is more suited towards graphically rich applications.
If you do have a specific requirement then you also might want to consider embedding WPF controls into winforms applications, rather than converting your entire application.
The learning curve is slow to get going, but once you get the idea it all starts to make sense. We have "Pro WPF in C# 2008" book floating round the office and its been a great help. Of course most things get googled to find an answer, but to find out why something is done the way it is this book was a great hope - to me anyway.
There are some annoying features but its still WPF is still quite new. Like most things, if you come across a problem someone has likely come across it before and there is an answer out there!!
J
Take a look here for a datagrid: http://wpf.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=29117
The main hurdle with WPF is simply the huge amount of new stuff to learn (if you wish to use it properly). I'd think twice if you're on a tight schedule, but it might be worth it if you have 6 months to spare...
Speaking from just my experience, moving from Windows Forms to WPF took some re-learning. A few months into the transition most changes made total sense. WPF removes much of the frustration associated with using Windows Forms. It allows for a truly rich UI development experience especially when working in tandem with designers. I strongly recommend WPF Illustrated by Daniel Solis as a learning aid.
With reference to the grid, Syncfusion offers a WPF grid control that implements the features you have asked for. It implements true virtual mode with cell level customization, printing and export to multiple formats including Excel. Disclaimer - I work for Syncfusion.