There's a new RatingControl in UWP that allows you to show ratings as a series of stars. I was wondering how I can change the size of the stars and also the spacing between them.
FontSize does not work like it did on the Telerik version for UWP.
I hope this is possible without restyling the whole control. For example, Microsoft explicitly states "Spacing customization" as a feature:
The rating control has many additional features which can be used. Details for using these features can be found in our MSDN reference documentation. Here is a non-comprehensive list of additional functionality:
Great long list performance
Compact sizing for tight UI scenarios
Continuous value fill and rating
Spacing customization
Disable growth animations
Customization of the number of stars
If you don't want to edit the control template, a quick way is to use ViewBox container to host the RatingControl, you can resize the RatingControl by resizing the ViewBox.
<ViewBox Width="" Height="">
<RatingControl .../>
</ViewBox>
Related
I'm trying to design app in portrait mode in UWP but option is not available .
Any idea to achieve that.
Okay this target what you're trying to achieve is not advisable as Universal Windows Platform is for all device families and it's not advisable to make the UI of the application specific to only a single device type. Although there are no particular ways to achieve this, there are many workarounds,
Create a DesignHeight and DesignWidth for your application so that the Designer of visual studio knows what specific screen pixel size you're designing for.
Use MaxWidth and MaxHeight in your application to ensure the application doesn't use full screen sizes, use height/width properties of your page to not make the app size resizable (highly not recommended).
If Portrait view is what you must have then you can set the max width of your RootGrid and if the app screen size increases your maxWidth centre align your content. (this can be done by setting the MaxWidth = 900 property and the horrizontalAlignment property to stretch) (See the Zomato App on windows 10 desktop for a good idea)
To Set the designHeight/Width:
d:DesignHeight="500"
d:DesignWidth="400"
use the above in your page tag
For The point 2:
use Height="900" Width="450" in your Page Tag
For the Point 3:
<Grid HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" MaxWidth="900">
</Grid>
The documentation for the Grid class states:
Starting in Windows 10, Grid defines new border properties that let you draw a border around the Grid without using an additional Border element. The new properties are Grid.BorderBrush, Grid.BorderThickness, Grid.CornerRadius, and Grid.Padding.
Does this make the Border class redundant? Why would I ever want to use a Border if I can do the same thing with a Grid and lay out children in a grid fashion if I so choose?
EDIT
I generally agree with Bart's answer, but there's a few things I would like to talk about.
Firstly, other layout controls (like StackPanel) do indeed have Border-like properties such as BorderBrush, BorderThickness and CornerRadius, so Grid isn't the only layout control which gets these new perks. But they are not attached properties provided by the Border class (or have anything to do with the Border class at all).
Secondly, I, too, thought that it would be a overkill to use complex layout control like Grid if I only wanted to add a border to a simple control like an image. But surely these layout controls would be optimized such that any impact to layout rendering speed would be negligible if they only contained a single child without any special layout constraints. So using a Grid instead of a Border shouldn't affect performance when it only has a single child.
Lastly, I decided to find out just how Grid achieves the border appearance. I created a simple Page containing a Grid with a border and a single Rectangle child, like this:
<Grid Background="Red" BorderBrush="Blue" BorderThickness="10">
<Rectangle Width="50" Height="50" HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top" Fill="Yellow"/>
</Grid>
with the following rendering:
Upon inspecting the live visual tree, the Grid class does not add any additional elements to the visual tree to make the border appearance:
I suspect whatever mechanism it uses to create the border appearance would be the same as what the Border control does (maybe it creates an additional Visual in the composition layer).
So I'm not really convinced that the "simpler" Border control would be better to use because it looks like the Grid control is already quite performant. I can't see any evidence for the Grid control adding any extra overhead to the visual tree (when compared to what a Border would do to achieve the same effect).
So far the only reason I can think of why I should use Border instead of Grid is to express meaning. It's obvious what the Border control does, adds a border around a single element. Grid is a layout control used to lay out child elements within a grid (which, as it so happens, has the ability to add a border around its children too as an added bonus).
Your first question designing your UI should be do I need a Grid or another layout control (StackPanel, RelativePanel, Canvas, ...) based on the specific behavior of each control (see MSDN). Note that next to Grid, also StackPanel and RelativePanel have Border attached properties. These attached properties are bonus for you to not add another 'redundant' control in your XAML tree to wrap your layout control in.
Why is the Border control NOT obsolete? Let's say you want a border around an image (which is inside any of the above mentioned layout controls together with other items, so you can't reuse the layout control's border). Now you have 2 options:
wrap the image in a Border control.
wrap the image in a Grid (or other layout control) and abuse the attached properties.
My wording should be clear which one is best: pick the Border control. A rule of thumb is: keep your visual tree as small as possible. Opt for the simplest control doing the task. Placing an image in a Grid just for having the border around it adds to much extra overhead in your visual tree.
I'm developing an application using the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK, I write UI descriptions using XAML markup.
I can't get a text box to fill width.
I see similar questions already posted but they involve ListView.
I'm really confused. There seems to be no proportional sizing options.
Tutorials show the use of explicit pixel counts in design.
Is that really the preferred method on Windows? How am I supposed to
deal with unpredictable screen sizes in Windows?
The items which I had, which were failing to fill their parent, were inside a ContentControl. The ContentControl correctly filled its width, but its child, which was a Grid, would not.
I found the solution here – https://stackoverflow.com/a/17627257/5476004 – and I will echo that solution here in case this post is found by someone else searching about the same problem.
The ContentControl requires two special properties in order for its child element to fill the parent. They are HorizontalContentAlignment and VerticalContentAlignment. Like so":
<ContentControl Name="MyContent" HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" VerticalContentAlignment="Stretch">
…
</ContentControl>
Fill now occurs correctly.
I hear RelativePanel and SplitView are new layout controls for Windows 10. What is cool about the RelativePanel put as concisely as possible?
UWP is more focused on making a single app which will run on all the platforms. These panels are also called as Adaptive Panels. It has taken care of Adaptive UI very beautifully in app development.
RelativePanel is better than StackPanel to implement the desired layout for multiple screens using the same base code.
It has attached properties eg. RelativePanel.Below, RelativePanel.Above, RelativePanel.RightOf, RelativePanel.LeftOf which is very useful for making the different UI for different Device family using the same code.
RelativePanel is even more powerful when it is combined with VisualStateManager. You can see the example here.
MSDN has all the answers but here is a summary as concisely as
possible.
RelativePanel defines an area within which you can position and align
child objects in relation to each other or the parent panel. It is
essentially a layout container that is useful for creating UIs that
do not have a clear linear pattern; that is, layouts that are not
fundamentally stacked, wrapped, or tabular, where you might naturally
use a StackPanel or Grid. If your UI consists of multiple nested
panels, RelativePanel is a good option to consider.
Using RelativPanel's attached properties (such as
RelativePanel.Below, RelativePanel.Above, RelativePanel.RightOf,
etc), you can position a UI elment relative to another UI element as
well as relative to the panel (e.g.,
RelativePanel.AlignVerticalCenterWithPanel).
RelativePanel, used in conjunction with AdaptiveTriggers, can be a
powerful tool to create responsive UI that scales well across
different screen sizes. If you want to explore further on this, there
is a sample you can download and experiment with.
I have a requirement to create a button in a Windows 8.1 app which has an icon and a text label. The icon will be a symbol from Segoe UI Symbols and the text label will be Segoe UI Semibold at a smaller text size.
I want to be able to reuse the button in different places within the app, using different icons and text labels.
How show I go about this? I could create a button and then edit the ContentPresenter to have a horizontally oriented stack panel with two TextBlocks, but then how could I reuse this? And how could I change the text in the two different text blocks?
Should I create a separate custom control with separate dependency properties for each of the textblock strings? I'm interested in hearing what you would do.
thanks
Create a simple Style. To make it easy, I would base it off the standardized AppBarButton style. You can format it to whatever size you want (I have done something similar to make a larger button or one with text on the side).
Have the main icon simply be a ContentPresenter which binds to the Content using a TemplateBinding. Make sure to set the FontFamily to Segoe UI Symbol. Have the text label pull from AutomationProperties.Name, similar to how the AppBarButton style does.
Then, whenever you want to use this just do:
<Button Style="{StaticResource MyCustomButtonStyle}"
Content="" // Where "000" is replaced by the number of the icon you wish to use.
AutomationProperties.Name="Text Label"/>
This should be extensible and easily reproducible to whatever location you need. When copying over the AppBarButton style, I suggest removing the artificial size limits (specifically the width of the main content Grid). I do suggest either giving the Text Label a fixed size or having it pull its size from the specified parent Width, so that it will Wrap correctly.
Hope this helps and happy coding!
Are you desiring to create something like for an AppBar? Take a look at AppBarButton and the style/types it supports. In Windows 8.1 we added some things around SymbolIcon specifically. Since you basically want two pieces of 'content' for your style you'll have to re-purpose one property (unless you create a custom control which doesn't sound needed for this scenario). Using AutiomationProperties.Name for the visible label is a good idea because it will also help with accessibility by default for those users.
Investigate the style for AppBarButton to get you started.