I'm trying to make a textblock control with a fixed size (height and width) in a window
using Expression Blend, but the content of the textblock will be changed programatically, so I want the text to be viewed by the largest possible font size without going outside the size of the rectangle.
How to do that?
Rather than changing the font size, use a ViewBox - WPF Tutorial. It seems to be better equipped for what you are trying to achieve as it gives the control within it the ability to resize indefinitely to the size of the area in which you place it.
Related
I've done desktop application's GUI for minimum 800x600 pixels. But now I need to make it look good when maximised in any screen size. There is so little to show, I don't know how to adjust the elements in big screen.
Now in 800x600:
Maximised in 1366x768:
I tried to make them bigger with screen size, but that give them kinda ugly, unsophisticated look. What should I do?
You need to use WPF Grid Layout to position your control. It will stretch the size of your control based on the defined layout.
You can read a tutorial here https://www.wpftutorial.net/GridLayout.html
You can use Uniform grid in that case
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/uploadfile/raj1979/uniformgrid-in-wpf/
I have a string to draw in a custom dialog box. How can i get the required length of string in pixels using WPF?
If you want to show it afterwards within a TextBlock, create the TextBlock and call Measure and Arrange. Make sure that the TextBlock has set the right font size before calling Measure.
Another way is to go via FormattedText, if you want to do your calculations on a low level.
You might not need the (pixel) size.
It might be better to automatically size the dialog to its content.
When designing WPF dialog windows in the XAML designer (that are not manually resizeable by the user), the windows automatically resize to fit their content, and everything is fine. But when I run my app, the windows become huge and there's a lot of empty space.
I know this is a "feature" of WPF that can be "fixed" by setting the SizeToContent tag, but another issue arises when I do this: If the window contains a textbox, for instance, and the user enters data that overflows the visible area, the window will stretch to accommodate it. This happens with listboxes, treeviews, you name it.
All I want is for Visual Studio to figure out the ideal window size that it shows me at design time, then set the window to be that size at runtime, and don't change the size after that. It seems like this should be an easy thing to do.
Edit: Figured out part of the problem: I have controls set up in a grid, and the column's width is set to "Auto" which is why everything is resizing.
Use View Box
The ViewBox is a very useful control in WPF. If does nothing more than scale to fit the content to the available size. It does not resize the content, but it transforms it. This means that also all text sizes and line widths were scaled. Its about the same behavior as if you set the Stretch property on an Image or Path to Uniform.
Although it can be used to fit any type of control, it's often used for 2D graphics, or to fit a scalable part of a user interface into an screen area.
<Viewbox>
<Enter your code/>
</Viewbox>
Try setting the window's height and width to Auto. Also, remove the SizeToContent attribute. This should fix it.
I do not think that this is this is something which is commonly requested so it's probably not easy to do, one method i can think of would be starting with automatic SizeToContent and handling the Loaded event and setting:
Height = ActualHeight;
Width = ActualWidth;
SizeToContent = System.Windows.SizeToContent.Manual;
What's the correct pattern to resize controls when a font size changes?
For example, I used the WPF designer to make a form, and placed UI elements from the toolbox. Late in the game I got the requirement that the font size of every UI element needs to be configurable, so now I'm thinking there has to be a better way to resize controls when the font size changes. Right now I'm doing alot of code behind calculations on Margin properties.
For such cases I usually place my control inside Grids and StackPanels, this way font size won't affect the layout, everything will be stretchable.
Never place controls on the Window using absolute coordinates.
Make sure your Height and Width on the controls are set to Auto.
When you use the designer/toolbox to add controls it usually provides a static height/width. If you type the tag in the XAML editor you get the control default which is usually Auto.
You'll notice the black diamond in the property window next to the attributes that are changed from their default value. You can right click and choose reset value to clear the attribute from your XAML and see what the default value is.
I need to implement a Canvas which scales its contents according to its size. I know there is Viewbox, which scales everything inside of it. However I cannot use that, because some elements have a fixed size and cannot be scaled.
Also how can I bind the size of the Canvas to the parent element (for example a resizable window). There is sizeToContent for windows, I want the size fitting exactly the other way round. Also the canvas uses some drawing based on the size of the hosting element, how is redraw triggered and how can I ensure that it only draws if it gets a valid (or min) size?
If you don't specify any width or height to the canvas it automatically uses all the available space. This is because the default VerticalAlignment and HorizontalAlignment are set to Stretch.
What do you mean by canvas that scales it's contents according to it's size without scaling all the contents as some have fixed size?
Update after comments
If your drawing algorithm already scales the content to the canvas' height and width then all you need to do is to resize the canvas to fit the area I believe? In that case just remove the hardcoded height/width values and the canvas will resize to fit the container.
You might need to use ActualHeight/ActualWidth instead of Height/Width in the drawing algorithm after this though. ActualHeight/ActualWidth return the values that the layout container will give your canvas so these represents the values the canvas is drawn with.
I think you can find the answers to all your questions in my London Underground demo.
I'm doing this from memory, but if I recall correctly a Window uses either a Panel or a Canvas as part of it's ControlTemplate (in which lies the ContentPresenter), which means that a Canvas placed directly in a Window will have issues resizing automatically like it might elsewhere. There are a few basic ways to address this.
1 Write a new ControlTemplate for your Window to use. :(2 Place your content directly in the Window rather than in a Canvas inside the Window. :/
3 Do a by-name binding. :)
<MyWindow x:Name="topWindow">
<Canvas x:Name="topCanvas" Width="{Binding ElementName=topWindow, Path=ActualWidth}" Height="{Binding ElementName=topWindow, Path=ActualHeight}">
...Content...
</Canvas>
</MyWindow>
(As it happens, I often bind grids inside Canvases in this fashion, so I can easily animate items moving from one grid position to another.)