I'm using VB.Net and in one of my WindowsForm I have created 3 GroupBoxes.
The problem is: I can't control groupbox.visible = true/false; so if I put the first GroupBox to false and the others to true... I still can't see the others.
I think I can't put one GroupBox on another group box, because when I do this, the overlapping group box will become the child of the below group box.
I have tried the Panel control but still have the same problem.
I think I cant put one groupbox on another group box, because when I do this, the overlapping group box will become the child of the below group box.
Yes, that seems like the most likely explanation. Windows has a hard rule about visibility: when a parent control is hidden/invisible, all of its children will also be invisible. This applies equally to all controls, which explains why the Panel didn't work for you either.
So if you want to change this state of your group boxes independently, you will need to make sure that they're children only of your form, not of each other.
This can be a real pain to get right in the designer using the mouse. Instead, use the "Document Outline" window, which shows you the forms on your control in a TreeView that emphasizes the hierarchy. Make sure that all of the group box controls are at the same level in that tree.
Related
MSAccess VBA:
Assume, in an arbitrary form, the focus is set to MyControl on that form.
How to "unset" the focus without giving the focus to another control?
I'm lokking for a code like
MyControl.UnsetFocus
In your circumstance, you probably want to just set focus back to the parent form. This meets the conditions of unsetting focus without giving another control focus, and tabbing or clicking will activate the focus / tab-navigation again from that form.
Here's an example:
Forms![MyForm].SetFocus
Note that per the documentation for SetFocus, if you attempt to SetFocus to a Form with child controls that have Enabled set, this will cause focus to automatically bounce to the first eligible child control per the documentation.
Form.SetFocus method (Access) # Microsoft Docs
The option to give focus to the parent form does work as proposed by meklarian
Alternatively, I recently had to do something similar but I wanted to update a textbox value and simply go back to whatever had focus before. This is another case where something like an "unsetfocus" would be awesome, but unfortunately doesn't exist.
Should you need to do something like this, the following works well
Screen.PreviousControl.SetFocus
Let's start with a confession: I came from a VB6 background, and I'm accustomed to coding within the events of objects on a form, and as such my code for events ends up in somewhat random order in the code window. With this habit, it's never been very important to remember the names of controls (although I name them well)... I just double click on a button in the design view, which brings me straight to the code for that control's primary event. If I forget the name of a control, I click it and view properties. It's not a habit I've moved away from.
Well, now this is catching up to me. Using VS Express 2013, I have a form that contains a HUGE number of containers-within-containers, labels, buttons, and other doohickeys. I ported my code from VS.NET Express 2008 where this wasn't a problem. But now the act of selecting any control in the design view takes around 10 seconds before I can view its properties. If I drag to resize a control, and another 10 seconds passes before I can select another control. It makes designing this form nearly impractical.
In this particular project, I'm using use a tab control (which is never visible to the user) to design many "screens" which each contain panels full of controls. The panels for each "screen" are moved out of the tabs and docked into the main form as requested by the user changing screens. (I'm using the term "screen" to mean a window full of controls, usually maximized.)
Within the same project, a simple modal password-change form isn't slow to edit controls visually, even if the complex form is still visible in the IDE.
My question is in three parts:
First, what the heck is it spending all that time doing?
Second, is there a setting I can tweak to improve the speed?
Third, should I give up on trying to speed it up as-is, and move each "screen" into its own form for design purposes to avoid this slowness? (It's a lot of work to do that now... see next paragraph.)
Thus far I have avoided separating "screens" onto separate forms because I don't want a new window to come up when users change screens, and because code for the controls in one screen may affect the properties of controls on other screens... In such cases I prefer not to write out
form.doohickey.text = "blah"
..but rather keep it as ...
doohickey.text = "blah"
I'm using VB but I don't think this question is VB-specific.)
First off, I feel your pain. I have a management section of the application that I'm writing and I'm using a TabControl as well. I have 10 tabs so far and I've only added controls to about 4-5 tabs. I just added up the controls I have and there are about 360 controls so far on this one form and the designer file is ~3300 lines long. Currently anytime I change a property value of one of the controls or go to save the Designer, it takes about 3-4 seconds each time. I have a fairly decent machine; i5-3320M, 8GB RAM, intel 330 SSD, and it still takes a bit for it to do things within the tabControl. It also takes FOREVER to open and load the designer on that form...
What I've found is that it is easier to open a new instance of Visual Studio, create a test application, add a TabControl with the same properties, and design a new tab page from there. When I'm done I do a copy-paste into my actual project. This works great except for the few custom controls I've written in my main application project, I just have to sit and wait while adding them.
I'm now answering my own question. This is the approach I've ended up using, and it helps a lot...
My overall goal was to have an interface that didn't present a lot of windows, but still presented many different "screens".
I used to place all the different controls of different "screens" on separate panels, which were each contained in separate tabs of an invisible TabControl. I would then move those panels to my main form as needed by changing their Parent property of each panel as needed. The only problem with this is that the Winforms designer got ridiculously slow as the number of controls on a form increased into the hundreds.
Now, I am now designing each "screen" as a separate form, each of which contains a panel whose Dock property = Fill. Such a panel contains everything else on the form. The form itself never becomes visible.
As needed for to view various screens, I execute:
ScreenForm.Panel1.Parent = Mainform
...or, depending on how I lay it out...
ScreenForm.Panel1.Parent = Mainform.PanelXYZ
...I also either unload or hide any panels which already exist in the panel's new container.
I was GLADLY SURPRISED to find that the code for the various events of the controls contained in the panels would still run, because such code exists in the first form's file, not the displayed form's file. Luckily, it seems I was wrong. Event code follows the control itself. I can copy/paste not only controls, but also their corresponding event code to new forms for easier development and a faster Winforms designer.
All of this is similar to a MDI interface with maximized windows, but no title bar or [X] is displayed.
Essentially I'm doing everything as I did before, except using separate forms with panels instead of separate tabs with panels. The WinForms designer is much quicker because there aren't so many controls on any form.
I think I accidently found a workaround for saving a lot of time when changing the name of a control on a overpopulated container/project. Before you change the name, toggle False/True the "Generate Member" property of the control you want to rename(I believe you can also locate this under the "Name" property). This adds a few more clicks to the procedure but saves a lot of time. My not-yet-finished project has over 4000 controls and multiple forms and some of them are very "heavy" (10 - 20 seconds to normally change the name of a control). This, of course, don't help in anyway with the loading time of the project (about 35 seconds for me) but I can live with it. Let me know if this works for you too.
I'm looking to have a navigation pane on the left side of my form which will change the right side of the form accordingly. I could always use panels and store the controls on the panels but is there a better way to do this? A tab control would be nice but I wouldn't want to see the actual tabs ...
Is there a way to do this?
Edit after seeing the answer:
Dim uc As New UserControl1
Form1.Controls.Add(uc)
Will add everything in the user control to the form1. Alternatively, if I had a Panel, I could do:
Panel1.controls.add(uc)
That would add it to the panel.
You can use panels, but you could also have your panes as UserControls and load them into a single panel instance, or even directly into the form.
Putting them into UserControls also means your form's generated class won't be cluttered with control members.
I would have to agree with #Dai Here is a great thread on it. It explains how to setup the panels in the ide.
I'm building an control interface for a system that consists of 1-4 modules. In my interface, each module has its own control set, grouped in a groupbox. I only want to show the control groups for the modules that are actually connected and hide the rest.
This is easy to do with the visble property.
I also want all of the groups to be stacked vertically in the UI such that when one is hidden, the rest below it shift up into its place as if you deleted a row in a table. It needs to be able to come back just as easily.
How can I do this or something similar in VB.Net?
The FlowLayoutPanel control does this automatically. Just put the group boxes inside of it.
Ok so this maybe a simple/silly question but I don't know so here goes:
In access let's say I want to have a frame control, so I click the option group button and add it to the desgin surface. However, I am not wanting to use this as a option group with radio button selection, instead I would like to add text boxes instead the frame, so that when I reference the frame, it references every control instead of it, hence the text boxes, cbo boxes, etc.....just as it would if they were radio option selections.
So can you do this?
I want whatever controls I add inside the frame to be easily referenced (i.e. make all controls visible just by using frameExample.visible = true) so that I can build my own tab control groupings.....
can this be done?
Thanks!
EDIT:
What I am trying to accomplish is having a form that includes a collection of controls (input controls - cbo boxes, text boxes, etc), that serve as the Main record information. These are saved to a table via an INSERT statement on button_click because this form is unbound.
Next I have 8 categories that are relative per each main record (and data that goes along with it). Each of these categories could have a sub form area and a button click that bring it's relative form into the sub form area. These sub forms would be unbound as well as I would just save data via SQL statement. So i know I could accomplish this by running the insert statement from the parent form, on the main collection control's data that would create the KeyID number, then run a SQL statement that would turn around and load that KeyID number right back onto the page in a hidden text box.
Then when I click one of the sub forms and load its relative collection of controls, I could then save that data along with KeyID for each of these sub-forms/tables.
SO......
I was wondering if instead you could define these controls as a collection so that you could hide and make visible all the ones you need on button clicks and avoid the need for additional forms (subs). I know that if a user enters data into a text box, and then somewhere along the way that box becomes hidden, the data still exists in it and still ends up in the SQL statement....
So I want all these controls to exist on the same form, but I thought what is I could encapsulate them into a frame like an option group, then I could call the frame and all the relative controls would be called up (made visible) as needed.
Sorry for the long explanation but I thought it would help.
I do not think you can do it with an Option Group, but what you are describing is pretty much a subform, yesno?
Some examples of hiding the tab control from an app that went live in March 1998:
Tab driven by transparent command buttons over labels styled to look like colored command buttons:
Same approach, more buttons:
In this case, fake colored command buttons don't drive the tab, but insted show/hide the tab and a subform. In this case, the tab is actually driven by the listbox:
A view of when the tab is hidden and the subform revealed. The listbox drives navigation within the subform, which has a visible tab on it:
So, there's a lot that can be done without showing the tab control.