Can I have master form that will contain windows forms? Or even windows control?
Thanks a lot.
For a form to contain other forms, you want MDI (as Zach Johnson already said). Setting the relevant form properties (IsMdiContainer / MdiChildren / MdiParent / etc) will get you the behaviour you want.
For something like a "master page for forms", you could try using Visual Inheritance. First you define a basic "master" form layout, leaving space for the controls on the child forms. Then when you create new forms, be sure to select Add New-->Windows Forms-->Inherited Form, and Visual Studio will prompt you to select a parent form to inherit from.
You can achieve this with inheritance i suppose
I think you want to create a Multiple Document Interface (MDI). Also, all windows forms can contain controls, so you can by definition create a form that contains a control.
A winform application I work has a main form that is completely built in this manner. It uses one Winform and everything displayed on it is a user control. All the displays are written as plugins and can be pulled into the applications menu and have their user control displayed.
Related
I'm a C# noobie and have recently made a CRUD app with windows forms and decided to upgrade it a little by adding a tab function to add new functionalities to it but after copying and pasting the design of my windows form into the TabControl field, the design shows up but the CRUD system itself no long works.
I feel like I might need to call the TabControl in the form design code but have no idea how I'd do that. All of my CRUD code was made directly on the WinForm design class.
As #Idle_Mind mentioned in the comments, after pasting controls into the new tab all the events wired to them were wiped. After rewiring them the problem was solved!
I'm trying to build an app in winforms with something similiar to masterpages in asp.net - a menu on top and when choosing an option from the menu the entire screen on the bottom will change while the menu remains (there are 10-15 screens in the future app, some are quite similar, some are not).
What is the best way of doing this? Should I use different forms for each screen or use a panel or something else?
If I use a panel or something how do I manage to use the designer with so many panels taking space on the screen?
Try with the MDIParent Form's. View the Example
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/12514/Multi-Document-Interface-MDI-tab-page-browsing-wit
If it is just keeping the same menu and opening/closing parts of the UI you could simply add and remove instances of usercontrols to the main form.
If you need more features such as docking (like Visual Studio) look at this
Another option is to use Form inheritance
Which one to select depends on what you want to reuse and the features you need.
One option would be to make your application an MDI window and then load entire forms, maximized, into the parent window.
Then, you would be able to treat each form as its own self-contained item, since it really would be exactly that.
Is it not an option for you to use WPF? A WPF browser application fits the paradigm you are describing quite well.
I'm writing a Windows application in WPF. I based my UI in a single menu and a tab control to display different documents or application forms. Since the menu as well as other things are fixed throughout the application, I need a way to display the contents of each TabItem. I have found two:
write a user control for each form, or
using a frame to display the content of each form.
The question
Is there any other single way for doing this. How do they compare in terms of clean code? I mean, in .net forms I only need load the form from the menu.
I know, I should go for any pattern like MVVM, but for this very first time I want to use the default approach.
I go with Frames and host Pages (not user controls). I like Pages over User Controls as the event model seems to have more hooks.
I am working on a little WinForm app and have been trying to find the answers to a few questions i have without any luck. Im a ASP.NET developer so WinForms development is new to me.
Here is my main question:
How do I create a menu system that once selected the contents will render in the Main form of the selected item. If its a GridView I want to the GridView to render inside the main application so they can navigate away without having to deal with the modal popup. I do not want to popup forms unless i explicitly say so. I guess the equivalent to this would be using a Master page in ASP.NET.
Make sense?
The closest thing to Master pages in winforms would be MDI (multiple document interface), which is a hideous Windows 3.1-era abortion of a user interface. Why this option is even still around, and why anyone still uses it, is beyond me.
The second closest thing (and something more acceptable as a UI) is just to have one main form in your application, and implement the different pieces of functionality your app requires as separate user controls which are displayed on the form and hidden as the context requires.
A weirder method, but one that might also work for you, is to use forms inheritance - design one "master" form with the menus and controls that you want to always be present, and then have each form in your app inherit from that master form. This would not appear to the user to be much different from my second option above, so I wouldn't bother with it.
There really isn't anything similar to Master pages in WinForms.
The closest to what you want to use would be a TabControl selecting a different tab will display that tab over the other tabs. If you don't like the tab look you could extend the TabControl to not show the tabs or hack it together by placing the TabControl inside a panel just large enough to show the content but not the Tabs and change tabs programatically in your menu control.
Like Master pages in ASP.NET, do we have any similar concept for Windows Form application. So that I dont have to repeat the same portion of form (Header and footer) many times through out the application.
Create a form class that defines the components you want, and make all your other forms a subclass of this form class.
Here is a good example in VB.NET.
That is what UserControls are for in Windows Forms.
Basically, you would create the "master" form and then the master form would be initialized with the types of the user controls that would go in the "placeholders". The form would just then create the controls given the Type instance(s) and add the instances to the Controls collection.
You can create a base form class with the controls that will be on every form of that type, and then derive all of your actual forms from that base class. This is called "Visual Inheritance", and the Windows Forms designer has some nice design-time support for this.
Alternatively, you might also look into the notion of having one actual form with your header and footer fields and a big blank panel where your individual "pages" will go. Make each page a user control and swap them in and out as needed at run-time. This is a standard way of making "wizard" dialogs, for example.