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
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.
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.
I am using a custom Panel, very similar to a radial panel.
I was wondering if there was a way to rotate the items as well as position them.
I know I could use different item templates, but that would require assigning the templates during coding. I'm looking for a runtime solution.
Any ideas?
What I did was create an item template that rotates the item based on a data bound property in the CLR object.
In order to rotate in a windows store app, I used a modified LayoutTransformer
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.
My main form has two panels, left docked and right docked. The right side panel has two child panels with top dock and bottom dock settings. The usercontrol is added to the right side top panel.
My usercontrol has a panel and a label. The panel is anchored on all 4 sides, the label is anchored on all except the bottom. At runtime I create this usercontrol and set it to dockstyle=fill and then I add it to my top right panel.
With everything set to "fill" I expect that when I add my usercontrol to the panel it will take on the appropriate width and height and pass that info to the child controls (labels) inside of my usercontrol.
My problem is that this stretching of the size does not happen when I create my objects during the Load event on my usercontrol. Even though initializecomponent has ran for the usercontrol the panel inside of it (4 corners anchored) has not taken the x/y values of the available space. As a result my usercontrol shows up about 50% of the width I want.
Lets say that instead of creating objects during usercontrol load that I instead start a timer and have the timer call my create routine when it raises the tick event. When I do things like this my objects are created with the full width/height that I expect. The only issue here is that this causes a delay in my interface.
Can someone help explain this behavior? My mainform is calling a "load gui" routine which is instantiating usercontrols, setting panel sizes, and then adding usercontrols to those panels. This particular user control is the last to load into the panels from that load gui routine so it does not make sense that the parent panel width/height would not be known yet. This is one of my first apps where I am purposely trying to use dockstyle=fill to keep things consistent across different main form sizes without writing all the extra size_changed code handlers. I'm sure this one is easy to work around once I know where the problem lies.
Thanks for any help provided!
this turned out to be a padding issue on the parent usercontrol. I also had to allow a bit of wiggle room to make sure that the controls didn't overflow the panel so I did a parent.width - 15 and that along with the padding made everything work much better.