The problem is fairly simple, but is best illustrated visually. Note that all screen shots are from the Visual Studio 2005 design surface. I've noticed no difference when I actually run the application.
Here is my user control (let's call this UC-1):
The buttons on the control are set to anchor to Bottom + Right.
Here is what it looks like when placed onto a particular parent user control (UC-A):
Please disregard the difference in colors and such. Some styling is done in the user control's constructor.
Notice the bottom of the control is getting clipped. The instance of the consumed control on the parent is set with a "FixedSingle" border. Notice also that the consumed control is taller than the original, indicating that the buttons bottom anchor settings are being respected, but are essentially overshooting where it should be.
To confirm this is definitely a problem on the parent control, notice another user control (UC-2) containing a data grid view when placed on the same parent:
Again, the instance of the consumed control is set with a "FixedSingle" border which helps illustrate the clipping. The datagrid is properly anchored to the Bottom Right. To reinforce the perplexity of this problem, here's the first user control (UC-1) when placed on a different parent user control (UC-B):
alt text http://i38.tinypic.com/2rnyjd0.png
Here's the second "consumed" control (UC-2) when consumed by a form:
Notice, no clipping this time.
I have spent many hours searching and experimenting to resolve this. I have exhausted the various settings of margins, padding, sizes (min/max), locations, anchors... etc. I can not for the life of me figure out why this one user control is causing child user controls to clip like this.
Another strange thing I noticed was that when I do an UNDO on the parent user control design surface (where the controls are misbehaving), the clipped user control instances actually shift location even though the undo action is unrelated to those controls. For example, if I make the main containing control larger, then undo, a couple of the child user controls jump up. They appear to move about as far as they are being clipped. Very suspicious.
Does anyone have any idea what is going on??
A very interesting problem!
Does your problem parent (UC-A) override any of the methods around sizing or client areas?
Or has UC-A got a negative value for the bottom value of Padding or Margin ?
Is there anything else docked at the bottom edge of UC-A? Perhaps, something that has a negative size?
Or, does UC-A set the constraints of its child controls? If the minimum height of the panel is forced too large, you would get this result.
Hope this is helpful! If not, is there any chance you post the source to UC-A ?
I was having the exact same problem and found your post while searching for a possible solution. Although I'm pretty sure that this is a bug in winforms, I found a bit of a workaround. Just put everything in your user control inside a panel, dock the panel to full, and do your anchoring inside the panel. This seems to alleviate the problem, although my button does tend up to show up at a slightly different size than it should in the parent control. Very weird. I compensated by making the button smaller in the designer, and it stretches wider by a few pixels in the parent control for some unknown reason. Hope this helps.
Assuming the parent control in question is not a standard .NET framework type, but a custom one, I'd guess that it is mixing up client and screen co-ordinates somewhere in it's logic. But that's just a guess.
Related
I'm working on a C# application's UI that has the following structure:
Main Form (MDI Parent)
Tree View
Multiple MDI Childdren, each containing:
Custom User Control
I'd like to separate the form's canvas space allocated for the Tree View from that where the MDI Children are allowed to move in. To that extent, I tried a SplitContainer and setting the MDI Child's TopLevel field to 'false', but, besides the fact that newly created MDI Children were created behind the old ones, I also had issues with them not being cleared properly from the screen and other weird issues.
As I don't have lots of experience with UIs in C#, is the path I am taking correct? Would it be easier to change the above structure so that it doesn't use MDI anymore, or is there a simpler way of dividing the canvas between the tree view and the MDIs, other than the SplitContainer?
Cheers,
Alex
UPDATE: Actually, the solution seems to work quite nicely, thanks! I'll probably be able to stop the widgets from moving in the wrong place by placing a simple check.
Besides that, is there any way in which I could make the TreeView resizable without involving a SplitContainer (because of the reasons mentioned in the post)?
Add a Panel to your Main Form and Dock it to the Left. Now add your TreeView to the Panel. Resize the Panel as necessary. Now your MdiChildren will take up the empty space to the right of the Panel...
*You can actually simply Dock the TreeView itself to the Left side of the Form, but the Panel approach would allow you to place other controls in that left side area as well. Just depends on your UI layout.
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.
I am getting up to speed on the new Microsoft Ribbon for WPF. I am creating a Ribbon with a Quick Access Toolbar. I have six items in the QAT--I'd like to show four of them and put the other two in the overflow button. At this point, all six buttons are showing, with no overflow button. How do I set the number of visible QuickAccess buttons? Thanks for your help.
As per current development is concerned, I think IsOverflowItem is Readonly. So you dont have the ability to specify for the item to be Overflown or not. It depends totally on how much space you have for the buttons. If you resize the window a bit smaller, you might eventually see the buttons being automatically populated in the menu as the menu will be dynamically created.
So based on the current implementation, you can only specify
<ribbon:RibbonQuickAccessToolBar IsOverflowOpen="True">
to make sure that the QuickAccessToolbar overflows when there is no room for the button.
I wrote an article on Ribbon Control which might help you a bit. Take a look
http://www.abhisheksur.com/2010/08/introducing-ribbon-ui-control-for-wpf.html
Thanks.
I have an ItemsControl with a number of elements, each one with its own ViewModel instance. Each item's ViewModel knows whether that item should be visible (currently each ViewModel has a Visibility property that the UI binds to). When my window first opens, some of these items are visible, others are collapsed. Later, some items' visibility might change in response to user interaction. The window sizes to its content, so the window resizes when items are shown or hidden. And the window is initially centered on the screen (which means everything has to be arranged properly right away, so the window knows its initial size and can center itself accordingly).
Now I want to add animations whenever an item is shown or hidden -- but I only want to animate if the item's visibility changes after the window is already shown. So if the window is already open, and the user does something that makes one of the ViewModels want to appear, it animates in; if the user does something to make one of the ViewModels disappear, it animates out. But when the window first opens, I want everything to start out rock-solid -- no lingering animations.
And I want the window to still set its initial size based on its initially-visible content, and I still want it to be initially centered onscreen. (Although actually, in this case, it would be acceptable if it centered itself as if all items were visible, if event ordering made it work out that way.)
I know a fair bit about WPF, but I admit I'm lost when it comes to triggers and storyboards. I haven't really done anything with WPF animations before, and I'm not sure where to begin.
I already tried using Reveal from the Bag of Tricks, but I had several problems with it, the biggest being that it doesn't have the "only use animations after the window is shown" behavior that I want -- my window would appear and the initially-visible elements would still be animating in. It also didn't play well with my layout (it was centering the elements horizontally, instead of stretching them to the ItemsControl's width), and a few other problems that might or might not be fixable.
I'm not too picky about whether I animate by stretching (e.g. by animating a LayoutTransform from SizeX=1 SizeY=0 to SizeX=1 SizeY=1, thus starting with squished text and expanding to normal size) or by just changing the Height (thus starting with only part of the content visible and revealing more as the animation progresses) -- I'm fine with either.
I'm open to writing my own Panel descendant (I've done it before) if that's the best way to solve this, and I can always steal code from Reveal and hack until I get it working -- but it seems like there should already be an easier way to do this, if I just knew what it was. I'm open to learning about triggers and storyboards, or whatever, if someone can point me in the right direction.
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).