Silverlight is awesome, most of my application users are giving positive feedback about silverlight. However some of the users are not able to live without copy/paste functionality. They are very much used to copy/paste functionality provided by HTML page out of the box.
How can I implement such a context menu as well as copy/paste functionality?
PS: Windows only solution is fine too.
Aside from using TextBox with IsReadOnly=true, you'll have a pretty hard time trying to simulate selection and copy/paste in a TextBlock. I would identify the areas they wish to copy/paste the most and use TextBox's there. You could even remove the border and make a transparent background and it should look nearly identical to adjacent TextBlock's.
If you do that then you will get the selection and copy functionality provided by TextBox and it works across browsers.
Otherwise you will need to go through the browser's DOM to put stuff on the clipboard and that will be a pain because of cross-browser concerns. Silverlight 4 adds a Clipboard API if you're able to start development with a beta version.
As Josh has answered, style a TextBox to look like a TextBlock. In terms of copy and paste:
Assuming the users aren't content with just CTRL+C, CTRL+X or CTRL+V - you can now access the clipboard in Silverlight 4:
string content = Clipboard.GetText();
Clipboard.SetText("hello world");
A context menu can be done in various ways, and in Silverlight 4 it is actually properly supported cross browser instead of just IE. You could do it with a Popup or a ChildWindow or just use one from the Vectorlight library:
This open source project on Codeplex contains a demo that does just that and much more:
http://sl4popupmenu.codeplex.com/
Related
We've been working on an application for the last few months that's aimed at Windows 7 tablet PCs. So we've used the Surface 2 SDK for most controls and it's all touch-happy.
I have noticed recently, though, that one of our custom controls isn't working as it should. This control provides popout menus, and these are achieved through the Popup control. On a developer's laptop, this works fine and the menus vanish when you click away from them. I've noticed, though, that on our test tablet they have a tendency to stay open.
I found that there was a SurfacePopup in the first Surface SDK, but I can't find one in the Surface 2 SDK. Did they get rid of it? Is there a 'best practice' approach?
If there's no simple solution, I may have to go old-school and add a window-sized hidden SurfaceButton below the menu when it appears, that hides itself and the menu when clicked or touched.
Beyond that I've noticed that sometimes the SurfaceScrollViewer within the popups won't work. I'm guessing this is because it's not picking up touch events properly. I tried adding this extension method to the window..
this.EnableSurfaceInput();
..but I get a NullReferenceException on System.Windows.Input.Mouse.get_LeftButton() which bizarrely suggests that it can only enable surface inputs for controls when there's a mouse plugged in.
Any ideas? They'll all be welcomed with open arms!
There's no SurfacePopup in the Surface SDK 2.0, however you can use a normal WPF popup. Then you need to make sure that it receives Touch Events by using the extension method you suggested above on the popup, not the window:
((HwndSource)HwndSource.FromVisual(popup)).EnableSurfaceInput();
Edit: As I just found out, this only works when the popup is initially open. To get it to work when the popup is opened later on, you don't need to use the popup, but the parent of it's child (see this question).
For the benefit of Daniel, and anyone else who needs a solution to this, I'll try to cast my mind back two years and explain how we got this working.
As far as I can remember, the answer was to use an adorner layer instead of a popup. Basically, every WPF control has an adorner layer, which sits above the control's UI stack. By default it contains nothing, but you can add whatever you like to it.
I got this all working by writing a custom control that allows you to place that control, with content, in the XAML and then show and hide it whenever you need to. When it's shown, it moves its contents into the adorner layer of the containing window, and when it's hidden it moves the contents back into the control itself, which is hidden from the user.
Afraid I can't go into any more detail than that, but as far as I can remember this was the ultimate solution; replacing popups (which never quite worked very well) with a custom control that uses the adorner layer.
Hope that helps!
I need a WPF control that acts like the Panorama control for Windows Phone 7, but I need it for a desktop application.
It will contain a series of panels (or Panorama Items) that the application will be able to slide through horizontally programmatically.
Also, the content inside the panels not currently displayed on the screen will need to be "lazy loaded". In other words, they should be referenced but not loaded or rendered.
Can I somehow adapt the WP7 Panorama control to do this? Or will I have to develop a custom control from scratch to behave similarly to it?
Thank you!
EDIT:
I could probably use a VirtualizingPanel to implement the lazyload behaviour.
MahApps.Metro while still not super mature does allow for the wp7 Panorama control. Demo of how to use a panorama here. I've played with it a little and while its not the most customizable thing out there it gets the job done. Pretty sweet. Also Sacha Barber (Codeproject Demigod) wrote up an article on making your own. Of which I haven't looked at yet but, the guy usually does awesome work. So I'd check that one out as well.
http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/arielbh/archive/2010/10/21/porting-windows-phone-7-s-panorama-control-to-silverlight-4.aspx gives some clues about how do to this.
It suggests using http://phone.codeplex.com/ as your base and then you can use http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=4b281bde-9b01-4890-b3d4-b3b45ca2c2e4 (Microsoft Surface Manipulations and Inertia Sample for Microsoft Silverlight) to run convert get it to respond to touch.
Seems none exist as far as I can see so far.
This blog has started an attempt at making it, so you could work from there to make your own. Be sure to also check out this page which details the creation of an individual panorama item too.
Is it possible to drag an HTML 5 object, e.g. an <a draggable="true">, into a Silverlight 4 control and accept it? We've attempted to build a simple prototype using an HTML 5 example and a trivial Silverlight control but the cursor changes to the no-entry sign whenever we hover over the Silverlight control. We do, however, get drag entry events firing in Silverlight.
Our control happily accepts files dragged from the desktop as expected. We think we've got the HTML 5 drag events set up correctly, and I can possibly get our test published somewhere in case that will help. We've successfully implemented dragging inside a Silverlight control but we now need to integrate with non-Silverlight page components.
Is this actually possible to set up or are we just doing something wrong? Thanks for any advice!
Silverlight Drag drop from external sources currently supports only file lists.
You may however be able to get the <object> tag hosting the Silverlight plugin to respond to a dragging. If so you can use the Silveright HTML Bridge to handle these DOM events. Its a bit of a long shot though.
Short answer, as Anthony says is No.
You can emulate the functionality by using the
the drag entry event and mouse button up event, then create a silverlight control that most closely matches the HTML one you were dragging, and hide the original html control (which should snap back to its original position)...
Its a little messy, but it works...
Incidently, as far as i'm aware, dragging between 2 silverlight instances on the same page would require a similar technique...
I don't know what this is called in SL, but I would like to replicate this functionality. If you go to this site: http://www.mscui.com/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/PrimaryCareAdmin.htm and click on the "Show Details" button located on the top, right-hand corder of the screen. When you click on this, there should be a "Scene Details" button-like feature on the right side. When you click on this, this is what I would like to implement. Can someone direct me please? Either to an online article, etc...
I'm not precisely sure what feature of the site you'r referring to (I'm blind so the description doesn't make much sense to me). However, two useful links - some of the MSCUI source code is available on Codeplex http://mscui.codeplex.com. Also, the Silverlight developer/designer on this project created Blacklight http://blacklight.codeplex.com which includes visual assets to use with Silverlight.
Although I don't know the specifics of the implementation, as far as I can guess, this is done by having a second Grid that follows the Grid for the page. Then, simply change the visiblity on the "guide" grid when the button toggles.
I believe that is simple, although it'll require you to work to figure out the positioning of the underlying page - but it's more flexible. With Blend it'll be easy.
Alternatively you could have a ton of additional UI elements on the page next to their respective controls, and either Tag or name them in a way that you can iterate over them to control visibility and interaction.
I think you're talking about a the grey overlay with a modal window on top. I think the best way to do that in Silverlight 3 is with the ChildWindow control.
I’m trying to run Google earth inside WPF but I don’t know how. Basically I have managed to run Google Earth in a Windows Form Control inside a Windows Form, everything was OK.
Trying to do the same thing in WPF, well, give strange result a small Google Earth screen placed anywhere in the form an not inside the User Control I have created, and there is now way to make this Google Earth Control grow, or shrink, when I grow or shrink the WPF Form.
Any help would be appreciated, I really mean any!
If you have a Windows Forms control that already works exactly as you want, you could always use WindowsFormsHost to put that control on your WPF form. That might be the easiest thing to do... or is that what you're already doing that isn't working?
I also wrote an application that placed Google Earth inside a WinForms WebBrowserControl that was based on the more-or-less official example hosted by Google. It worked fine. I struggled to recreate the same application inside a WPF WebBrowserControl. My experience confirms what appears to be the general consensus that the WPF WebBrowserControl is harder to use because it provides less control. (e.g. With the WinForms WebBrowserControl you can use the properties to remove the scroll bar and eliminate the IE security question on startup, but with WPF WebBrowserControl you have to use kludges inside to HTML file loaded to get the same effect.) If you are following the Google GE plugin WinForms example, you have to move the JavaScript callback functions into a separate class because of WPF window cant be a parent of the .Net-COM interop between JavaScript and C#. Maybe the other artifacts you described are due to how you resolved this latter limitation. Before finding this solution, I was tempted to put the WinForms WebBrowser control inside the WPF window, but others have posted of unpleasing side-effects of doing this.