Setting TopAppBar on page inside an inner frame places the app bar at the top of the window (good), but still takes space (bad) - xaml

When I have a page with an CommandBar set on Page.TopAppBar (and that page in an inner page on another page), the UI element appears at the top of the window (which is what I expected and want).
However, the page on the inner page gets "space" taken out of it - as if the CommandBar is actually on it.
I tried a couple of things, the only thing that kind'a works is playing with margins, but even that seems to have weird artifacts (and anyway is not how I want to solve this).
Here's the XAML for the outer page:
<Grid Background="{ThemeResource ApplicationPageBackgroundThemeBrush}">
<Border VerticalAlignment="Stretch" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Margin="100" BorderBrush="Pink" BorderThickness="3">
<Frame x:Name="frame" />
</Border>
</Grid>
And here's the XAML form the inner page:
<Page.TopAppBar>
<CommandBar>
</CommandBar>
</Page.TopAppBar>
<Grid Background="Black">
</Grid>
Here's what the UI looks like - as you can see, the inner page has a bunch of space "taken" out as if the appbar is actually located on it.:

Remove container, just put CommandBar inside your Page in inner Frame. Put CommandBar in the bottom to make sure it overlays other element in the inner Page.
Final code should look like:
<Grid Background="Black">
<!-- Content here -->
<CommandBar>
</CommandBar>
</Grid>

Related

CommandBar overflow in UWP app - can it be scrollable?

Background
I am developing a UWP app, which is being designed for mobile, desktop etc.
I am having a bit of difficulty with the CommandBar on certain pages - specifically on a phone (but this may also apply to a smaller desktop window).
Issue
Where I require quite a few AppBarButtons on the CommandBar, sometimes it overflows and I am unable to see/access the hidden buttons.
Here is a sample screenshot where you can see that the "Documents" label is being cut off. There is also another button (which cannot be seen/accessed) which I guess you would say is "underneath" the ... button:
XAML
Shortened for brevity (nothing special/out of the ordinary here)
<CommandBar>
<!-- Secondary Commands -->
<CommandBar.SecondaryCommands>
<AppBarButton Command="{Binding RefreshCommand}"
Icon="Refresh" Label="Refresh"/>
<AppBarButton Command="{Binding AddToLibraryCommand}"
Icon="Save" Label="Add to Library"/>
</CommandBar.SecondaryCommands>
<!-- Primary Commands -->
<CommandBar.PrimaryCommands>
<AppBarButton Command="{Binding CompleteFormCommand}"
Icon="Paste" Label="Complete a Form" />
<AppBarSeparator />
<AppBarButton Command="{Binding ViewPeopleCommand}"
Icon="People" Label="People" />
<AppBarButton Command="{Binding ViewPropertiesCommand}"
Icon="Home" Label="Properties" />
<AppBarButton Command="{Binding ViewDocumentsCommand}"
Icon="Folder" Label="Documents" />
<AppBarSeparator />
<AppBarButton Command="{Binding ViewMapCommand}"
Icon="Map" Label="Map" />
</CommandBar.PrimaryCommands>
</CommandBar>
What I need
I still need the other AppBarButtons to be accessible by the user.
The amount of buttons on each CommandBar can vary - sometimes they fit fine, some have 1 (like the example) hidden, others have 2 or 3 hidden.
I am thinking that (surely, somehow) it might be possible somehow to allow horizontal scrolling in order to access the other buttons?
What I have tried
I have resorted to moving some of the non-essential commands to the CommandBar.SecondaryCommands, to free up some space; as can be seen in the screenshot/XAML above - however, the main problem is still apparent.
There is no ScrollViewer attached property, and trying to nest the AppBarButtons inside one naturally throws me a compiler error:
Invalid type: expected types are IObservableVector<ICommandBarElement> or ICommandBarElement, actual type is ScrollViewer.
I have searched the Web far and wide for answers to see if it is possible, and it doesn't appear there is much literature (or any similar StackOverflow answers) on how I can go about solving this issue.
All advice is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
As for me, it is not pretty good UX behavior, but you can override Style for CommandBar and wrap primary ItemsControl into ScrollViewer.
Find the default style and find the PrimaryItemsControl and replace to:
<ScrollViewer VerticalScrollMode="Disabled"
VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Disabled"
HorizontalScrollMode="Enabled"
HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Visible">
<ItemsControl x:Name="PrimaryItemsControl"
HorizontalAlignment="Right"
MinHeight="{ThemeResource AppBarThemeMinHeight}"
IsTabStop="False"
Grid.Column="1">
<ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
<ItemsPanelTemplate>
<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" />
</ItemsPanelTemplate>
</ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
</ItemsControl>
</ScrollViewer>
After that don't forget apply new style for CommandBar:
<CommandBar Style="{StaticResource ScrollablePrimaryComamndCommandBar}">
P.S. full xaml on pastebin

UWP: Transparent Grid with MapControl beneath is flickering

In my Windows 10 UWP app there is a view, where a MapControl is partially (at the top) covered by a Grid. This Grid has cockpit-like elements in it (e.g. speedometer) and has a semi-transparent background-brush (#CC6A6E4D).
The actual problem is, that this background-brush is flickering, whenever one is interacting with the MapControl. Weird thing about this is, that this issue exclusively works on just one of my three test devices (Lumia 550) and only is present in portrait-mode (but not in landscape-mode).
An example-layout, where I've got that issue would be this:
<Grid>
<maps:MapControl
Name="MainMapControl"/>
<Grid
Height="50"
VerticalAlignment="Top">
<Grid.Background>
<SolidColorBrush Color="#CC6A6E4D" />
</Grid.Background>
</Grid>
</Grid>
Any ideas?

Creating a Hub like a Pivot on WP 8.1

What I'm trying to do was extremely easy in SL/WP 8 but seems to be impossible in WP 8.1 without redefining the Hub template myself. I want to create a hub with a header that:
Scrolls horizontally.
Has a background that scrolls along with it.
Has no margins on either side.
I know this can probably be solved by just having my background image include the background and the hub just being transparent, but I wanted to know if there was a way to solve it in XAML.
Putting a Grid with a background into the Hub's header just highlights the background as much as the hub needs--not stretching all the way across:
<Hub>
<Hub.Header>
<Grid Background="Red" Height="60">
<TextBlock Text="My Header" />
</Grid>
</Hub.Header>
</Hub>
The above makes the header with the text "My Header" but only the text part has a background. Furthermore, the Hub itself seems to have inner margins of 16 on each side so the background doesn't stretch across the whole phone screen.
Should I just be going with a background or deconstructing the template to remove the margins?
Far from an elegant solution but basically I put the background outside the Hub and gave it negative margins like so. Hacky but I guess it works.
<Grid>
<!-- This is the header bar -->
<Grid Height="64" Background="Red" />
<Hub>
<Hub.Header>
<StackPanel Margin="-6,0,0,0">
...
</StackPanel>
</Hub.Header>
<!-- actually just defined the margin in my ResourceDictionary to target all HubSections -->
<HubSection Header="section 1" Margin="-2,-20,-4,8" />
<HubSection Header="section 2" Margin="-2,-20,-4,8" />
</Hub>
</Grid>

How to rearrange WrapGrid contents when zoom level changes?

I am developing a Windows 8 Metro application whose layout is pretty simple. It consists of a single page with a WrapGrid enclosed in an ItemsControl, which is in turn enclosed in a ScrollViewer. This is the XAML code of the application main page:
<Page ...>
<Grid Background="{StaticResource ApplicationPageBackgroundThemeBrush}">
<Grid x:Name="MainGrid" Margin="120,140,32,0">
<ScrollViewer x:Name="ScrollView"
VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto"
HorizontalAlignment="Stretch">
<ItemsControl x:Name="itemsControl" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch">
<ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
<ItemsPanelTemplate>
<WrapGrid Orientation="Horizontal"
HorizontalChildrenAlignment="Stretch"
Margin="0"
HorizontalAlignment="Center">
<WrapGrid.ChildrenTransitions>
<TransitionCollection>
<EntranceThemeTransition />
<RepositionThemeTransition />
</TransitionCollection>
</WrapGrid.ChildrenTransitions>
</WrapGrid>
</ItemsPanelTemplate>
</ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
</ItemsControl>
</ScrollViewer>
</Grid>
<Page.BottomAppBar>
...
</Page.BottomAppBar>
</Page>
There is also an user control of which new instances are created and added to the ItemsControl programmatically when the user clicks on a certain button in the application bar. As expected by the fact of using a WrapGrid, the control instances are stacked sequentially in a single row until there is no more room in the screen, at which point they appear in a new row and it is necessary to scroll down in order to see them. So far so good.
Now I want to implement a feature and I don't know how to achieve it. What I want is the following: when the user zooms out in the application, causing the controls to appear smaller, I want the new available space to be used so that more controls can be displayed per row; instead, the current behavior is that the ItemsControl itself is reduced and the extra surrounding space is unused.
For example, imagine that the user adds 10 controls. There is room for 4 controls in one row, so that 3 rows of controls are displayed, with 4, 4 and 2 controls. If the user zooms out and now there is room for 7 controls in a row, I want the ItemsControl to rearrange itself so that now there are only two rows with 7 and 3 controls. How could I achieve this?
I hope I have explained myself properly. Please don't hesitate to ask if my question is not clear enough. Thank you very much!

XAML: How to restrict a datagrid to its parents width

I have a [silverlight] WizardContainer control that hosts a number of wizard pages. The wizard fits nicely on its host form. If the page has narrow content it doesn't expand to fill the container. So I set HorizontalContentAlignment to Stretch. This works.
However if the wizard page contains a datagrid with lots of columns it stretches the page instead of autoscrolling itself - as its width is not fixed. If the following XAML is on a usercontrol with a width of 350 I want the grid to be 350 and have its own scrollbars. If the WizardContainer is made smaller than the page minwidth then the MainScroller should come into play.
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" >
<ScrollViewer x:Name="MainScroller" VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" >
<ContentControl Margin="4" x:Name="WizardContainer" HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch">
<Grid Background="Red" x:Name="WizardPage" MinWidth="300">
<sdk:DataGrid HorizontalAlignment="Left" Height="120" >
<sdk:DataGrid.Columns>
<sdk:DataGridTextColumn Width="150"/>
<sdk:DataGridTextColumn Width="150"/>
<sdk:DataGridTextColumn Width="150"/>
</sdk:DataGrid.Columns>
</sdk:DataGrid>
</Grid>
</ContentControl>
</ScrollViewer>
</Grid>
Note if I fix the width of the datagrid everything in this XAML works. But I want the grid to expand as the user resizes the form containing the wizardcontainer.
You have the DataGrid wrapped in ScrollViewer. This, effectively, tells the DataGrid that it has infinite available width. Since the DataGrid is not constrained, it'll take as much width as it's columns desire.
You can set HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Disabled"if that fits your design (i.e. you need only vertical scrolling from your ScrollViewer). This will disable scrolling horizontally and will constrain the DataGrid on the horizontal axis.
DataGrid has a ScrollViewer in it's ControlTemplate. As a broad general rule: try avoiding a ScrollViewer-in-a-ScrollViewer situations. It's (almost) always a headache to debug and eventually you'll have to set something as a fixed size (or calculate the size on the fly).