Adding a Control to Beginning of a FlowLayoutPanel - vb.net

I have a program that grabs product data and adds a custom control for each record to a FlowLayoutPanel.
I would like to add a control to the beginning of the FlowLayoutPanel, as opposed to the end, to appear as the first item.
Does anyone have an idea how this is done? I would like to avoid having to repopulate it every time I add an item to the beginning.

You can use the SetChildIndex method of the FlowLayoutPanel's Control collection:
Dim newButton As New Button With {.Text = flp.Controls.Count.ToString}
flp.SuspendLayout()
flp.Controls.Add(newButton)
flp.Controls.SetChildIndex(newButton, 0)
flp.ResumeLayout()

Related

Getting Selected Items from a Listbox

Good Wednesday All.
I am running into a brick wall (easy for a shade tree coder to do) I have a Listbox that i populated with a datatable. I want to get the all LicenseID's from the selected items. In other words, if the user selects 3 out of 8 of the list box, I need to get the LicenseID for each of those 3.
Below is how I populated the listbox
Using cmd As New OleDbCommand(cmdText, conn)
conn.Open()
Dim reader As OleDbDataReader = cmd.ExecuteReader()
dt.Load(reader)
ListBox1License.DataSource = dt
ListBox1License.DisplayMember = "InstitutionTypeAbrev"
ListBox1License.ValueMember = "LicenseID"
End Using
I need to get the selected items from the listbox to use later.
I am thinking of adding the selected Items to an array.
I have searched around STackOverflow for some examples but none seem to work for me.
Any Help Appreciated
I'll show you how to derive the answer for this yourself:
I've set up a form:
Really simple; the listbox is like your listbox. The button is just there to give me an easy way to stop the code and examine what is going on.
I wrote some code to populate some things into my listbox. It's a screenshot because it doesn't matter that you have exactly this code, so you don't need to write this code (hence why I'm making it hard to copy paste):
I've double clicked my button to make a click handler. I haven't written any code, but I have put a breakpoint on the method declaration - see it's red? Click the margin where the dot is, to put breakpoints in your code. When you hit them, the code stops and waits for you to inspect:
I've run my app and clicked my button. The code has stopped and VS has switched to showing me the code, not the app:
I can now point to some variable that is in scope (like ListBox1) and see a tooltip, or I can open the Locals/Autos windows and see variables that are in scope and drill into them:
Expand you ListBox in the Autos/Locals window. It has a lot of properties. Scroll to SelectedItems:
SelectedItems is a collection of things.. We can tell partly because Microsoft is good at naming collections of things with a plural name, and because the inspector says "enumerate the enumerable" .. it means that it is a bunch of things that we can ForEach to look through
Expanding it we see that my selecteditems has only one thing selected (i truly did only have one selected item in my list when I clicked the button)
We can see that an entry in the SelectedItems collection is a DataRowView type of object. We can see that a DataRowView has a Row property that is a DataRow.. This Row is the DataRow in the DataTable to which the list is bound (you set the DataSource to a DataTable; this is a row from that table).
Every time you dig into the tree another level, that's like using either a dot or an indexer in your code. At this level we've gone listbox1.SelectedItems(0).Row..
So from this we can see that we need a code like:
' we will "enumerate the enumerable"
For Each drv as DataRowView in listbox1.SelectedItems
Dim originalRow = drv.Row 'we could do this to get the row...
Dim selectedAnimaId = row("AnimalID") ' ..and then index the row to get the animal ID ..
Dim selectedAnimalId = drv("AnimalID") ' ... or it's actually possible to index a DataRowView directly, so you can skip the row part
Next drv
It can be handy to write code while you're stopped on a breakpoint so you can look at the values of things as you're writing, and check you're going in the right direction. You might need to use F10 (or whatever key is associated with "step over"/"step into") to move the yellow bar along and execute code lines one by one:
You can only move the code execution along if you've written complete, legal code, but it doesn't have to be logically correct. You can back up and execute again by dragging the yellow arrow in the margin (or right clicking and choosing Set Next Statement). Here I've put some dummy statement in to move along to, so i can check that my animalID is correctly set in X like I expect . I point to X to see the value:
The standard ListBox won't help you with that, past getting the DataRowView objects from the SelectedItems collection. As an alternative, here's a custom control that you can use in place of a standard ListBox that will help you:
Public Class ListBoxEx
Inherits ListBox
Public Function GetItemValue(item As Object) As Object
Dim index = Me.Items.IndexOf(item)
If (index <> -1 AndAlso Me.DataManager IsNot Nothing) Then
Return Me.FilterItemOnProperty(Me.DataManager.List(index), Me.ValueMember)
End If
Return Nothing
End Function
End Class
You can then call GetItemValue and pass any item and get the same value back as you would if that was the SelectedItem and you got the SelectedValue. To get all the values in an array:
Dim licenseIDs = myListBoxEx.SelectedItems.
Cast(Of Object)().
Select(Function(o) CInt(myListBoxEx.GetItemValue(o)).
ToArray()
For more information, see here.
In case you're unaware, if you add a class to your project and it is a control or component, once you build, it will appear automatically at the top of the Toolbox window.
If you already have a standard ListBox in place and you don't want to have to delete it and add a new control, you can edit the designer code file by hand to change the existing control. To do that, open the Solution Explorer and select a node within your project, click the Show All Files button, expand the node for your form, double-click the designer code file and then replace ListBox with ListBoxEx (or whatever you call it) in the relevant places. I'd advise creating a backup copy or syncing with source control first, in case you mess it up.

Filter a listview in vb.net

Currently I have a program that is able to write to a ListView with column named : number, time, description . This listview is not bound to anything data, I'm just basically writing into it using the code.
What I want to do is to have a TextBox, whereby if the user wants to look at particular number i.e. 2, when they type into the textbox, then I want the listview to only show data with number = 2. When there's nothing in the textbox, I want the listview to show all the data.
I have being looking around on the internet and I didn't seem to find a filter method. Does it even exist and if so how would I go about implementing this.
All help is appreciated.
While I recommend using a DataGridView with DataSource but in cases that you need to use ListView, you can use this solution.
You can filter your list view this way:
Define a member field as backup storage of items:
In form Load after adding items to list view, store each item in that member field
Put a TextBox and a Button on form and handle Click event of the Button and in the handler, first clear all items of ListView then each item from that backup storage that matches with criteria.
Member Field for Backup of Items
Private ItemsBackup As New List(Of ListViewItem)
Fill backup after loading items in ListView in the form Load event
For Each item As ListViewItem In ListView1.Items
ItemsBackup.Add(item)
Next
Code of Filter
Private Sub Button1_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
Me.ListView1.BeginUpdate()
Me.ListView1.Items.Clear()
For Each item As ListViewItem In ItemsBackup
If (item.Text = Me.TextBox1.Text Or String.IsNullOrEmpty(Me.TextBox1.Text)) Then
Me.ListView1.Items.Add(item)
End If
Next
Me.ListView1.EndUpdate()
End Sub
You can also use above code for TextChanged event of the TextBox.
Here is a test data:
For i = 1 To 30
Dim item As New ListViewItem(i.ToString())
item.SubItems.Add(DateTime.Now.AddHours(i))
Me.ListView1.Items.Add(item)
Next
A normal .NET ListView can't do this without a considerable amount of work. So, you could use ObjectListView -- an open source wrapper around a standard .NET ListView -- which has already done all the work for you.
It has built-in filtering (and highlighting)

me.control.remove is removing every second control in a loop for some reason

I have some dynamically created checkboxes on my form and I want a function to delete them all.
I've got the following function:
Sub delete_checkboxes()
Dim radios = Controls.OfType(Of RadioButton).AsQueryable()
For Each r As RadioButton In radios
Me.Controls.Remove(r)
Next
End Sub
For some reason the above function only deletes every second radio button and leaves the rest.
Just as a test, I changed the function to delete radio buttons which are ticked:
Dim radios = Controls.OfType(Of RadioButton).AsQueryable()
For Each r As RadioButton In radios
If r.Checked Then
Me.Controls.Remove(r)
End If
Next
With the above I can tick each radio button and it will delete them invididually... so what it is in the first function which could be causing it to skip every second radio button?
Change AsQueryable() to ToList()
The reason it fails is that you are not supposed to modify a iterator while you are still looping over it. AsQueryable() is just using a state machine internally to know your current position in the Me.Controls collection. It doesn't actually keep it's own collection of controls, but just knows which controls you need from your original collection.
When you remove a control in the middle of loop, that position state is now wrong... in fact, it's off by one. You then remove the next control, which puts that internal position state off by one again, and so on. After a whole set of off-by-one adjustments and you end up with half of the controls still on your form.
ToList() will work, because it creates a separate collection for your controls, so that you don't have to mess with that state as your remove them from your Me.Controls collection.
this is usually how I accomplish it.
For Each cont As Control In Me.Controls
If cont.GetType().Name = "RadioButton" Then Me.Controls.Remove(cont)
Next

How to add a control after another dynamically?

What i am looking for is how to add another control(say a textbox directly under another textbox) that is added through code rather than the designer. I can get it to work using the .height property of the control then adding another 10-20 to it
dim space as integer
space += textbox1.height + 10
however, is there a way to do this on the location rather than the height? In this case, if I want to add a textbox at the very end of the frame or groupbox without having to add additional in between. Since the location takes two parameters(x,y), is it possible to place controls based on another controls location?
Does this help? (not clear what you are after, but yes, you can set the Location or Size all at once):
Dim thisTB as new TextBox
thisTB.Location = new Point(xSpot, ySpot)
thisTB.Size = otherTB.Size
Me.Controls.Add(thisTB)

Re-Creating Dynamic Controls

I have a VB.Net WinForm Program.
I dynamically create panels with controls.
Each panel has:
2 Labels
1 DataGridView
1 Button
Everything works fine the first time I create the panels.
Everything gets created, and everything is functional.
If I have to re-create the form, I get rid of the existing panels (and their controls) with this code:
For P = 0 To Panels.Count - 1
For Each PControl In Panels(P).controls
Panels(P).controls.remove(PControl)
Next
Me.Controls.Remove(Panels(P))
Next
Panels.Clear()
DataGrids.Clear()
lblCounts.Clear()
Where:
Panels, DataGrids, & lblCounts are ArrayLists holding controls
When I re-create the panels, I get the panels and all of their controls except Buttons
When I step through the debugger, I see the buttons being removed, and I see them being created, but they don't appear in the panel
Any ideas?
Your question is regarding a button not appearing when you are adding the controls, but you are only showing the removal process, which is flawed.
Make a UserControl that holds your Labels, Grid and Button. Add that to your form. That's what UserControls are for.
Also, when you are done using it, just call:
MyControl.Dispose()
Otherwise, I suspect you are leaking memory. Remove does not destroy the object.
For Each PControl In Panels(P).controls
Panels(P).controls.remove(PControl)
Next
This part may kick you out of your code. The 'For Each' does not like it when its items change during execution. check it with Breakpoints. if is is really a problem , you could do..
lazy method, by just adding .ToList
For Each PControl In Panels(P).controls.ToList
Panels(P).controls.remove(PControl)
Next
similar to:
Dim AllControls as New List(Of control)
AllControls.AddRange(Panels(P).controls)
For Each PControl in AllControls
Panels(P).controls.remove(PControl)
Next
or:
For i as integer = Panels(P).controls.count -1 to 0 step -1
Dim PControl as control = Panels(P).controls(i)
PControl.parent.remove(PControl)
Next
Try this
WHILE Panels(P).controls.count > 0
Panels(P).controls.removeAt(1)