In an effort to teach myself more about WPF, I'm trying to build a simple application. Where I work we have some hardware that has a bank of 8 dip switches used for setting an address from 0 to 255 (as an 8-bit number). It's a simple concept that I would like to build into a WPF windows application that would allow users to see the dip switch settings for a given address. I built a similar app in WinForms that would simply show/hide pictures of dip switches. I'd like to port it to WPF and do something more elegant.
I've done some simple databinding with strings and numbers, making them show up in labels, and I've done some introductory work with user controls.
What I would like to do is create a user control that mimics a single dip switch, which would have a "State" property that would be a boolean true or false. I could then place 8 of them in my window and tie them to my code.
In the XAML, I would have a drawing of the dip switch, and the sliding part would move to the on or off position depending on the true/false value of the State property. Once I figure that out, maybe I could animate it later.
At this point I'm looking for a conceptual overview... how would I create this property in a user control, and have it's value affect the position of the graphical switch?
Thanks.
You can easily create a DIP switch control by replacing the template of a CheckBox, if you want to know how to create your own templatable controls read "Templates for Uncommon Controls" by Charles Petzold at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc135986.aspx
One way you could do this is to use the Control Template to customize the appearance of the WPF RadioButton class. The code for the RadioButton Control Template is available on msdn.
You should be able to create your own UserControl, then paste this code into the UserControl.Resources node, and then start modifying the look and feel of the RadioButton while maintaining all of its properties, which should make it easy to use as a boolean indicator.
The style of the "Bullet" could be easily replaced by images or vector graphics of flipped or unflipped dip switches.
Related
I'm looking to create a custom control which represents a hand.
This at needs to be bound to a datasource, then if a value/index value is present in the datasource which is representing a particular finger, the finger in question should appear green.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to start of with such control?
Basically I'm creating an app which records which fingers people where their rings and how many.
So graphics on each finger will show Green plus a number showing how many.
Rough Hand Design for User Control
Any help or direction will be mostly appreciative.
I'd recommend a usercontrol rather than custom control for this. As I think that link Clemens posted says, unless you really are going to switch out the template of the control then you don't need to do a custom control - which would be harder than a usercontrol.
This will have at least one dependency property you're going to bind your collection to. Make that an ObservableCollection. You can then pass say 0,1,0,2,0. If people change the rings they wear super dynamically you can set one of the collection to itself to cover change notification to the control.
Inside this I'd put a viewbox with a canvas in it.
Grab an outline of a hand from somewhere. You want to get a geometry out of this so look for a svg preferably.
Maybe https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/stop-hand-silhouette_57659
Then download and install InkScape.
Use this to trace bitmap if that's all you have then save as > xaml.
Open that file in notepad and you'll see a path with a set of sort of co-ordinates. Grab those. These can be used to define a geometry you use as a resource or directly used as the Data to a path.
I use such a resource for the email "icon" in this:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/32610.wpf-layout-lab.aspx
Or you could probably use one of the hand icons from syncfusion's metro studio ( free ) https://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/metrostudio
A Path can be used for your hand.
You then want 5 itemscontrols for your thumbs and fingers.
You could maybe make each of them a usercontrol as well but I'd try 5 controls for a first iteration.
They should template each item they're given into a green rectangle defined in itemtemplate.
Position 5 of them to taste on your hand's digits.
Bind their itemssources by index to your collection and use a converter to return the number of objects specified by that. So if it's 3 then you generate three objects.
That viewbox is there to scale everything. So you can size your control however you like and the rings will stay on the fingers.
I have a project which requires that consists of two user controls, A and B.
User Control A (UC-A) appears in the background, the most distant
component of my window.
User Control B (UC-B) appears in the
foreground, overlaying User Control A. UC-B is partially transparent.
As is common with many UI designs currently (as of Aug. '18), I want it that UC-B causes the all elements behind it to blur (and only the elements behind it), as per the mocked up image here:
Please note, this mockup is not designed to imply that the picture of the sea shore is the Windows desktop, it was simply the first image I came across on my PC. The sea shore picture is representative of UC-A, and the panel labelled "My Panel" is representative of UC-B.
I know that it is very easy to apply a blur effect to an element and all of its children, but how can achieve the effect below, whereby the background is only blurred where the panel exists?
Please keep in mind that these are separate User Controls.
Windows already has functionality to do something similar on a Window level, but I can't see how to do it on a WPF UserControl level.
I have come across this answer, but this doesn't work for me as I am using different user controls. This answer was the closest one to my problem that I could find.
It seems you can do this with vanilla WPF with a bit of work, but far easier, this great library exists which handles exactly this scenario!
I need to create a WPF application which is maximized and which rotates amongst about 10 different screens. Each screen will take the entire area and show different content.
I already know how to maximize the window with
My question is what is best to put inside that window to achieve what I want?
Ideally I'd be able to have 10 different .xaml files and I just load one after the other to take the entire screen. I'm not sure the best approach for accomplishing this in WPF.
Thank you!
One quick way to do this is to use WPF's built in page navigation. By making your root window a NavigationWindow and each view a class derived from Page (similar to work with to a UserControl or Window) you can just set the NavigationWindow.Source to a relative URI that points to the page you want to show (like a web browser) and simply switch it as needed.
This sounds like a classic MVVM application, which is simply too much to put into detail here. Google MVVM or Model-View-ViewModel, or pick up the book Advanced MVVM by Josh Smith (widely regarded as an expert in such things).
However, this is basically what you are going to have:
One class, the ViewModel, is an abstraction of the data that you need to bind to
Your data Model
A View for each thing you want to show. A View is simply something that holds your UI, be it a DataTemplate or a UserControl. Each View is bound to the ViewModel
The Views are the things that will "rotate" (although rotate in WPF implies animation and/or transformation). How you switch between them is up to you, although it sounds almost like something that would be done with a DispatcherTimer and animation (i.e. like fading between pictures in a slideshow).
This question is really too broad for this forum - you will need to do quite a bit of research on WPF fundamentals before proceeding. Again, MVVM is a good direction to start.
EDIT: Something More Lowbrow, per OP Request
This is probably as simple was you can make it (and still create separate XAML files for each piece of content):
First, create 10 UserControls (XAML files) for the stuff you want to show.
Next, add an instance of each of these user controls to your main window. Set the Visibility of each of these to Collapsed, except the first one to show.
Put a "Next" button on the main window.
In the code-behind, handle the Click event for the Next button. In there, keep track of which UserControl is visible, by name. Set the one that is currently visible to Visibility.Collapsed, and set the next one that is supposed to be visible to Visibility.Visible.
This is certainly an ugly solution, and not very WPF-ish, but it will get the job done.
In order to make a convenient UI for an .Net 2.0 Winforms application I am working on, I have need for a control that I'm pretty sure goes beyond the "out of the box" behavior of any standard control. A mock-up of what I'm trying to achieve follows:
Mock up http://www.claware.com/images/temp/mockup.png
Essentially, this part of the application attempts to parse words into syllables from tribal languages (no dictionary to refer to; any and all unicode characters are possible.) By the time the user gets this far, he has already defined the vowels / consonants in his language and some other configuration. There is then an iterative process of (1) the application guesses which syllables exist in the language based on some rules, (2) the user refines the guesses, selecting the correct parsings or manually parsing a word, (3) the application "learns" from the user's feedback and makes smarter guesses, (4) repeat until the data is "good enough" to move on.
The control needs to present each word (the grey headers), then all the syllable break guesses (the white areas with dots separating the parts of words.) There is also a way to manually enter a parsing, which will display a text area and save button (at the bottom of the mockup.) When the user hovers over a guess, the background changes and "accept / reject" buttons appear. Clicking on the accept, or entering a manual parsing, removes the entire word from the list. Clicking the reject button removes just that item.
I'm by no means 100% sold on the formatting I have above, but I think you can get a general idea of the types of formatting and functional control I need. The control will also scroll vertically--there may be thousands of words initially.
My question for you experienced WinForms developers is: where to start? I would really, really like to stay within the .Net core framework and extend an existing control as opposed to a third-party control. (At the risk of starting a religious war: yes, I suffer from NIH-syndrome, but it's a conscious decision based on a lot of quick-fix solutions but long-term problems with 3rd party controls.) Where can I get the most "bang for my bucK" and the least reinventing the wheel? ListView? ListBox? ScrollableControl? Do I need to go all the way back to Control and paint everything manually? I appreciate any help that could be provided!
[Edit] Thanks everyone for the ideas. It seems like the most elegant solution for my purposes is to create a custom control consisting of a FlowLayoutPanel and a VScrollBar. The FlowLayoutPanel can contain instances of the custom controls used for each word. But the FlowLayoutPanel is virtual, i.e. it only contains those instances which are visible (and some "just out of scroll"). The VScrollBar events determine what needs to be loaded. A bit of code to write, but isn't too bad and seems to work well.
I would look at the TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel controls. These will let you organize a series of controls with moderate ease in a vertical fashion. I would then create a UserControl that consists of a label and 2 buttons. The UserControl will expose properties like Text and events that are exposed for the button clicks.. For each entry in the list, you will create an instance of the UserControl, assign the text value, and handle the click events. The instance will be placed in the Table/Flow panel in the correct order. Both of those layout panels do allow for inserting items between other items so you can add/remove items from the list dynamically.
Edit:
Given the length of what you are trying to render, I would consider using the DataGridView and do some custom rendering to make it perform how you want it to work. Using the rendering events of the DGV you can merge columns, change background colors (like highlighting the dark gray lines), turn on/off the buttons, and handle changing the grid into edit mode for your rows to allow modification or inserting of new values. This method would easily handle large datasets and you could bind directly to them very easily.
Well, this certainly looks like a candidate for a custom component that you should be creating yourself. You can create this using standard .Net drawing commands along with a text-box, and a regular button control.
Now you want to find out where to start.
Create a Windows Forms Control Library project.
Drop in the textbox and the button control.
The panel drawing code should preferably be done by code. This can be done using the regular GDI+ commands.
Edit:
Here's another idea, and one that I've practically used in my own project with great success.
You could use a web-browser control in the app, and show your data as html. You could update the source of the web-browser control based on the input in the textbox, and clicking on the links in the web browser control will give you the event that you can trap to do some action. Your CSS will work.
I used this technique to build the 'desktop' in an app I made called 'Correct Accounting Software'. People loved the desktop so much that it is one of the best loved features of the app.
Here's how I would do it:
Create a custom control. In this custom control, have a ListBox atop a LinkButton, and when the LinkButton is clicked you can make it give way to a TextBox. The ListBoxes will have the top row unselectable... you can probably get the rest from there. When you get your list of words, fill a Scrollable of some kind with one control for each word:
(foreach String word in words){
myScrollable.add(new MyComponent(word));
}
From there, I'm not sure what you want to do with the boxes or the data, but that's my initial idea on the UI setup.
Use the WebBrowser control and generate the HTML markup into it using DocumentStream or DocumentText.
Is there a simple way in WPF to create a usercontrol with different modes for display, update or insert a new object?
I'm thinking (coming from a web background) something like a listview control where you can create display templates for the different modes. You can then quickly change the mode, depending what you need to do.
Any links that points me in the right direction is very welcome.
Thanks
The closest option to what you're thinking would to be to use a DataTemplateSelector. Set ListView.ItemTemplateSelector to an instance of your class, and then based on the current mode of your app you can return the appropriate template for that mode.
You might also consider using the VisualStateManager to create states for your control for each of the modes, and then change the template (or parts of the template) based on the state of the control.