i am trying to create a wpf app and have different parts in user controls.
in the navigation i have some buttons (now using the ribbon ctp). is it possible to change the main user control when different buttons are pressed in xaml. or is this just a bad way to do things?
sorry, really new to xaml and im trying to get my head arround it.
Further to what Carlo has said,
The way we do it is to have a blank grid in the place you want your controls to all appear and then use BlankGrid.Children.Clear() and BlankGrid.Children.Add() to set up which control is visible in this position.
We found that was the nicest programatically as we have a large number of custom controls, but Carlo's method would work nicely if you wanted to use the designer.
I think this is a pretty regular procedure in WPF. In my experience, me and other programmers put the controls where we want to show them and make their visibility hidden, collapsed or visible depending on what we want to show the user.
Related
I am working on new WPF/MVVM project, where I see all most all controls are written for different needs, right from textbox to treeview. All are rewritten for simple need, for example, grid,stackpanel control are rewritten to add space between each item and textbox is rewritten to include label for it so that it has both label and text input are on itself.
My question : Is there any serious issue we would encounter because of this customization?
Already, I am seeing issues with aligning all controls, will i would see any more issues because of this?.
You should never create a custom or user control to add margins, a label to a TextBox, or a new ItemTemplate to a ListBox.
UserControls are for grouping frequently used combinations of controls into one reuseable control. An example may be a custom List-of-Values control that opens a dialog. This would be fine to implement as a UserControl.
Custom controls are good when a native control does not suit your needs. Say that you want to reimplement a DateTimePicker from scratch because the native one doesn't include milliseconds.
There are no serious issues as such, but you may find yourself maintaining all these controls for the next many years without there being a need to do so.
Settings Margins should be done in the View where you are using it, or on a Style in a ResourceDictionary.
This is of course only my opinion (and that of many others, I except), but if you find that the majority of your controls are 'customized' this way, you are doing it wrong.
Style and Templates rather than UserControls and custom controls.
The main issue is that you lose the ability to alter margins only in a single view. If you change your custom controls' inner paddings and margins, you will be changing all the views in your solution. If you use a style, you can always override it by defining a new style in the view, or by setting the property directly.
I am building an application and I would like the one of the forms to look like the control panel
Would you use a listview with groups?
thanks
No, I don't think you can make the ListView do this. At least not without rewriting its painting routines.
It isn't going to be easy to replicate this layout precisely in WinForms. There's nothing you can just drag over from the toolbox that is going to do it. It is possible, but it will take some effort.
What I would do, conceptually, is break it up into pieces. I count 8 different repeated "blocks". So I'd create a UserControl that models each of these.
Inside of the UserControl, I'd have a PictureBox control to display the icon, a Label control to display the heading, and a TableLayoutPanel that can be filled with the desired number of LinkLabel controls. Set all of the properties of the controls so that they match, and then write public methods to set the icon, heading, and add/remove links.
Then I'd drop a TableLayoutPanel onto my form, set the margins to have lots of whitespace, and add as many of those UserControls as necessary. At the top of the form, of course, you'd need another Label to display the heading/instruction text. Make the form's background white, and you're pretty much there.
The logic to switch between views isn't implemented, but consider whether you really need that. It is important in Windows because users are used to the old way of doing things. This doesn't apply to you.
I need a listview with multiple buttons for scrolling. E.g.
ScrollToTop Button
ScrollUp Button
ListView
ScrollDown Button
ScrollToBottom Button
I have got the buttons working in a WPF application by using the code mentioned here. Now, I need to reuse this by making it a control(lookless?). The layout of the listview and buttons can be horizontal or vertical. Should I use custom control or user control?
Here's what I'd recommend.
Don't use any pre-composed elements. Create a behavior ScrollList, accepting two parameters - Direction and Target, Direction will be Top || Bottom, Target you list - again you can use ElementName binding.
The reason why I'd recommend this approach is the actual code required to scroll your list is tiny, while managing layouts via properties in WPF is proved to be mess an anti pattern (yes you can go ControlTemplates, but it's definitely too havy for what you're trying to do).
If behaviors are too complex just consider creating a couple of commands.
I'm making a custom dropdown button (since the one included in wpf requires too much hacking to style right). Now that i got the button bit out of the way i need to add the drop down part.
My first thought was to add a stackpanel and use that to contain the items but it gets cut off if it leaves the borders of the grid that the button is in. Next up was the popup primitive, it gets on top of everything nicely enough but position wise it just free floats and i haven't figured out how to make it follow the button it was spawned by. I also tried using contextmenu but that seems to have no positioning controls at all and just sits where the mouse made it..
Anyways wpf is a big package and I'm just getting into it, anybody know which direction i might find what I'm looking for?
Preferred approach normally is to use a Popup. You got two very important properties with a Popup
PlacementTarget and Placement
Setup a binding for PlacementTarget on the Popup to your custom Button and then use Placement to position the Popup accordingly w.r.t to the PlacementTarget(Button)
Placement accepts an enum of type PlacementMode which gives you quite a few options to position the Popup.
So I'm just starting out with WPF, and I'm really annoyed by the fact that if I lay two Grids on top of one another, the top Grid isn't opaque. It makes designing extremely annoying. Can this be turned off somehow?
I'm just building your standard Winforms STYLE application, but in WPF. I'm just trying to start bridging the gap here. In Winforms(and VB) you'd always have group boxes or something on your form, and then depending on some user context, one of those group boxes would be on top. Its how I've designed forms since time immemorial. One of two things must be true here:
A) This is not the recommended way to design Windows going forward with WPF, but I don't understand what you're supposed to do
B) There is some property to make the Grids opaque so I can build the Window in the style that I'm used to.
I'm fine with answers that solve either A or B. If I'm not doing things the right way because they've changed, then please enlighten me.
Update: So it turns out, I can make the grid opque by setting the background color, but now it seems like I'm locked into a White background as opposed to sticking with the system colors.
You could use SystemColors to make the control background colour match (rather than being white).
I don't understand why you want to put one grid on top of another though. In WPF you generally use a single grid to stack multiple visual elements within one region. Can you explain why you want to hide things in the background with foreground elements?
It sounds a little like you're implementing a tab control -- switching between pages of controls depending on focus. Have you experimented with the new TabControl?
I'm moving from WinForms to WPF development wherever possible and have found that in doing so it's taken some readjustment. WPF has a completely different way of laying things out and now that I'm more comfortable with it, I think it's superior. I'm guessing you just need to ride the learning curve a little longer.
Hope that helps.
EDIT: In response to your comment, I imagine you can have a tab control without tabs, though I haven't tried it myself (might be worthy of another question on SO). Tab controls are headered controls, meaning that they have a header item and a content item. In this case, the header is the tab button, the content is the page item. You can specify a ControlTemplate that details how these items should be displayed relative to one another.
Interestingly, many other types of common GUI element are also headered controls:
Menu items - The menu item text/icon is the header, and the optional submenu is the content
Tree view - Each node is the header, and optional children are within the content
Group box - The header is, well, the header and the content is, well, the content :)
Note that in the case of menu items and tree views, the type may recursively nest within itself. This is quite elegant and can give some wildly different presentation options over the same logical model with only changes to the control template.
For more information read about HeaderedContentControl and HeaderedItemsControl
You could use the following:
<Grid Background="{DynamicResource {x:Static SystemColors.WindowBrush}}">
<!-- content -->
</Grid>
This will respond to changes in the system colors on the fly (the DynamicResource does this).