Can't find anchor property in WPF, was it reconstructed to Horizontal and Vertical Alignments?
Is it the same?
I wanted to stretch my control in both sides (right and left), but it worked rather different than anchor
You can do something like Anchor like this
<...HorizontalAlignment='Stretch' VerticalAlignment='Stretch' Margin='50,50,50,50'.../>
The Anchor and Dock properties of Windows Forms are replaced by appropriate layouting containers in WPF. Depending on what exactly you need you should be able to create your desired layout in WPF with the Grid or DockPanel containers.
There are small white circles at the edges of the control. Click them, and they will be converted to triangles which mean the edge is anchored.
Related
I've placed an Ellipse on a Canvas. Only Canvas.Top and Canvas.Left properties are shown in Properties Window. There is no Canvas.Right or Canvas.Bottom. I'm trying to understand why some properties appear (like Top and Left) but others don't (like Bottom and Right).
PS: I know i can set Right and Bottom properties in XAML, but I'm not asking how to set those but why can't I set them in properties Window.
Thank you for reading!
The Top/Left under the layout is to adjust the position of the control in the Canvas. If you use Grid or StackPanel to contain the controls, Top/Left will disappear. In fact, BottomProperty,LeftProperty,RightProperty,TopProperty are all fields of Canvas. The Layout doesn't show all the fields, you can add it in XAML code.
You don't see them because they're not properties.
You just decided you wanted bottom and right.
That doesn't make them exist as properties.
Top and left are used as the x and y co-ordinates to position something on a canvas.
Thus they're fairly important aspects and obviously necessary.
The people building the framework added those attached properties.
The bottom and right points can be calculated using height and width.
If they thought about it at all, whoever was writing the framework must have decided they weren't necessary.
I'm a newbie. Designing a form that can be resized, and I want my textboxes, labels and buttons to resize with the form, can someone tell me how to do this?
It depends on the type of layout you need. The "basic tools" you have to do that are following properties: Anchor and Dock.
Anchor
With the Anchor property you "attach" a side of an element to a side of its container. For example if you place a button in the bottom-right corner of a window and you set "Bottom, Right" as Anchor then when you'll resize the form the button will keep its relative position to that corner.
Now imagine you place a multiline text-box in the form, resize as needed (for example 4 px from top, left and right border and 128 px height) and set the Anchor property to "Left, Top, Right". When you'll resize the form that control will keep its height but it'll resize to keep its margins (so if you'll make the form wider its width will be increased).
Dock
Dock is different. With docking you "say" to the Layout Manager to use all available space in one direction. For example if you set to Left then your control will keep its width but it'll use all the available height and its location will be most left as possible.
You may have more than one control docked in a container, imagine you have 5 textbox with Top docking inside a form. They'll be stacked to the top of the form using all the width (and resizing). Another example: a Top docked control (as a banner) and a "Fill" docked control (as main content). Remember that with docking the order of controls matters (if you first place the "Fill" control it'll use ALL the available space and the "Top" dock control will overlap).
Even more
Moreover you have some layout controls too (tables and stacks). They're really easy to use and a 30 minutes of "experiments" will clarify much better than a long text.
I want to be able to display a tooltip centered above my control.
I know how to customize the XAML used to display the tooltip using the TooltipService, however, the placement options the TooltipService makes available only allow you to specify top, bottom, left, right, etc. They don't let you specify an alignment once on the given side.
By simply using the TooltipService, selecting a placement of "Top" puts the tooltip above the control and has it aligned to the left side of the control. If there is not enough room for it to be aligned left, it moves it to be aligned on the right side of the control.
I want the tooltip to be centered on the top of the control. I don't want it to anchor to either the left or the right while on top.
Is this possible? How?
you should check out the TooltipService. MSDN documentation is here. and here is a (WPF) sample from CodeProject.
A quick shot: you could create your own TooltipService class to extend the possibilities of the existing one to manipulate a Tooltip instance.
Here you can find a nice class to help position a popup by specifying a list of preferred positions, like the TooltipService does for tooltip. You can specify a Top placement with Center HorizontalAlignment. I know this isn't a tooltip but I thought you could check it out and use it to create a BetterTooltipService.
I would like use a panel whose children have coordinates specified as percentage of total panel's width/height. Moreover, I should be able to animate the coordinate property, for example to make a button move from 10% to 50% panel's width.
I've made 2 attempts:
Use a Grid and specify size as stars - this was not enough, because AFAIK by default WPF cannot animate distance properties specified by stars. I've found somewhere a custom class that enabled me to do so, it even worked, hovewer I consider that solution overly complicated an I am looking for something simpler.
Use a Canvas with fixed width and height and put it inside a Viewbox - this is a simple solution, but when resizing the Viewbox the whole content of Canvas is resized too. I want the content to have fixed size.
Is there a simple solution or should I implement my own panel (or maybe extend one of the existing ones, i.e. Canvas)?
Cheers!
I would:
subclass Canvas, perhaps calling it RelativeCanvas or RatioCanvas
add two attached properties: XRatio and YRatio
override ArrangeOverride and loop over all children. For each child, use their XRatio and YRatio along with the ActualWidth and ActualHeight of the RelativeCanvas to calculate and apply values for their Canvas.Left and Canvas.Top attached properties
You would use it as follows:
<local:RelativeCanvas>
<!-- the top-left of this button will be center of panel -->
<Button local:RelativeCanvas.XRatio="50" local:RelativeCanvas.YRatio="50"/>
</local:RelativeCanvas>
One thing you might like to add after you get that working is control over alignment. For example, I might to align the center of a control to the specified ratio, not its top-left corner.
There's one here: WPF Proportional Panel
Been checking the web and this site, but couldn't come up with any descent results.
Is there a way to make a canvas in WPF show scrollbars on overflow ? Been trying the scrollviewer, but can't get it to work :(
Thanks in advance..
The problem you're running into is that Canvas, unlike many WPF panels and containers, does not size to contents. That means if you add an element which goes outside the canvas boundaries it will not update it's size. Hence embedding a Canvas in a ScrollViewer will do no good unless you manually update the size of the Canvas.
It sounds like what you want is a Canvas which supports size to contents. This blog entry has exactly that control.
http://themechanicalbride.blogspot.com/2008/11/auto-sizing-canvas-for-silverlight-and.html
I took a different approach and abandoned the Canvas for Grid. The Canvas is more performant but for my purposes at least I haven't noticed a difference. The grid can mimic the behavior of canvas by doing the following.
Create a single row,single column grid.
Set the HorizontalAlignment to Left
Set the VerticalAlignment to Top
Use Margin "x,y,0,0" to set the position.
Bam..works just like canvas and it works great in a Scrollviewer.