In the layout I'm writing, there's an area where a different control is shown, depending on various conditions.
Can I place all of these controls at design-time, or I must "re-attach" and "remove" each control at runtime?
You can host a panel inside a TableLayoutPanel cell. Or any other control container. In that you can put as many controls as you want.
For example, you could use a nested FlowLayoutPanel. So you may not need to manually perform layout management.
Related
I'm developing the custom UI layout system for our custom SBO forms. I.e. catching form's resize event and arranging the controls according to our specific layout logic. The problem is that, apparently, SBO tries to arrange controls according to its (clunky and primitive) logic on every form resize first! My code handling the resize event and rearranging the items works, but there is a noticeable performance delay, as items are essentially re-positioned twice on each form resize - once by SBO itself, and then by my code.
Is there any way to stop SBO arranging controls on our custom forms during resize, so that they will be positioned only once by my code (in the resize event handler)?
This page by Boyum IT helps to explain what the resizing rules are.
There's additional information on this page
To summarize those pages, every form is split into 4 quadrants, which are effectively pinned to the corners of the form that they belong to.
That means that as you resize the form, these quadrants separate from each other, leaving large sections of space between them.
I don't believe that there's an easy way to prevent this behavior out of the box, but you can manually override it using the B1 UI API, by setting the LinkTo property of the Items to match the ID of one of the Items in the top left quadrant, which causes the given item to move with the same behavior as that of the item specified in LinkTo.
I just have it in my mind. And I can't explain it so here it goes.
A system that only uses 1 form?
It have a two panel, left and right.
The left is consist of buttons
Then the right is associated on the buttons and will change whether what button will be clicked.
Any ideas?
My preference is to do this via custom controls, rather than panels... but panels can work too.
There are a number of ways to do this:
Keep all of the controls layered on top of each other, and then set the Visible property to false for controls/panels you don't care about and to true for the Control/Panel that you do
Move the controls you don't care about out of the visible area
Remove/Add the Controls/Panels from Form's controls collection entirely
I think you can also get a TabControl to put the tabs along the left side, with some formatting that looks more like buttons, such that what you want will be handled without needing to write any code to switch layouts
Any of those can work. Whichever option you use, I have two recommendation for controlling layout and making the transitions smooth.
Call SuspendLayout() before making any changes, and then call ResumeLayout() when you're done. This will help avoid stuttering or a partially rendered form.
Look at the TableLayoutPanel Control. This control will allow you to arrange your top-level panels so that they can be resized with proportion. If you also then dock your individual panels, you can quickly build your program so that it resizes correctly.
You can have several panels, one on top of another. Change their visibility, depending on which one you need at a given moment.
Option #2 would be using a vertical tab control (or a tab strip - see another answer there).
I am trying to populate my windows form with new controls and data based on what is read from my database. The left side of the form is a static panel which will not need re sizing but I need to create multiple labels on the right side which requires more space. I added the vscroll control but am having trouble increasing the size of the right side of the form.
To use a scroll-bar will require a semi-low-level implementation where you need to always update the view by repositioning the elements, calculating your scroll-bar in relation to total view, what elements would be visible and so forth.
A better solution in this case will probably be to add a Panel control on the right which is docked (f.ex. Fill) and then set the AutoScroll property to True.
This way you leave all the "low level" stuff to the Panel control and you can add and position the elements you need to the Panel's Controls collection instead.
I have the following question:
The current project I'm working on is full of inherited controls, allowing us to tweak the behavior a bit in comparison to the default behavior. Now i created a sort of notification control (composed of an image an tooltip control) which I want to add to most of our control collection. This would allow usage of thise notification anywhere we need.
I tried dragging my own control to the design view of the inherited control and I pass on the properties that should be set on my own composed control.
Rendering however seems to be a problem. Since the original control is an inherited control, the size of that control can vary. My notification should be appearing behind the control:
[control][notification]
control being the inherited control, notification being my own control.
Is this possible on the inherited control? The only other option I see is making 2 versions of the control, one clean inherited and a composed one with both (in which case I would need to relay all databindings, which I don't want).
As I understand it, a Panel isn't meant to have any visible "chrome." The StackPanel, Grid and Canvas don't have any visible elements (with the exception of the gridlines, which they say are only for debugging layout.)
In my example, I am going to create a Custom Panel that uses Attached Properties to lay out its children controls. However, I want my Custom Panel to present a visible "grid" of sorts in the background. The look of the grid (sizing and positioning) will depend on the size and position of the child elements.
What are some of the ways to achieve this? Being very new to Silverlight and XAML in general, my first guess was to create a Custom Control which includes my custom panel for layout.
I think I'll be able to figure out the specific code, but I need to be pointed in the right direction in terms of what building blocks are appropriate for this scenario.
You are correct that custom Panels cannot show any extra chrome; they can only display their Children (Grid being an exception).
To do what you want to do, you could create a custom Panel which just adds extra Children to display the chrome. This would not be a good design though (since users of the Panel would see these extra items in the Children collection).
The best idea is to do what you said: create a custom Control that exposes a Children property. This control could internally use a private custom Panel to lay out these elements (e.g. TabControl uses a special TabPanel for laying out the tabs). In the Controls default template, you might want to use TemplateBinding on the Panels' Children property to your Control's Children property.
Panel can add Adorners to its children, read this article about adorners: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms743737.aspx