Change Properties Of Inherited Controls At Design Time?
Mar 23, 2009
I am using visual inheritance and was wondering if there is a way to change the properties of inherited controls at design time, preferably in the form designer. If not, then in the designer code. I have my control declared as Public in the base class. I can access it in the child form code, but not in the form designer. Is this just not possible?
I've written my code to implement a new property and to set the content to this default text and grey the text whenever the textbox is empty, and to hide it when the user starts typing. This all works fine at runtime.[code]My question is this : If I place an instance of the control on a form, and set the DefaultText via the properties grid, why doesn't my Property Set code run?I'd expect the control on the form to show my new DefaultText in the control, but instead it remains blank. When I run the form it does display correctly, but just not at design time. I place a breakpoint in the DefaultText set property code and it simply doesn't run.
I'm making a control and I am trying to finalize my design time properties grid. I have several List(of Class) items as public properties and when I click on the design time menu (while testing the control) there is the word "Collection" and a button with an ellipsis (...) that brings up a neat pop up with the buttons Add/remove and all of the public properties of the collection's class on the right hand side. Basically for a non-collection instance of a class (with public properties) I'd like a similar button to show up. I know I could put all of the properties in the main control class and group them, but I like the pop up box feature. Anyway to duplicate this? (think font grid item etc.)
I've been building controls for many years professionally and personally, but even back in VB6 days I just could not work this out. After all this time I remembered about it again.If I create a usercontrol/containercontrol and add one or more controls to the controls surface, I just cannot figure out how to access the controls at design time.
Basically, in the designer I want to be able to connect a collection of objects to another property. When the collection is set, the property should display a drop-down allowing you to select one of the values from the collection. It is a collection of a custom class.Right now I have the collection implementing the IList interface from the System.ComponentModel.Generic namespace. I've looked into type converters, but I haven't been able to figure out yet how to get them to work for my needs.
I am creating a UserControl with rich design-time support that should eventually look like the Options window in Visual Studio (or many other applications). Basically a split container, to the left is a TreeView with 'option categories', and each node in the treeview corresponds to a 'panel' to the right with certain options.
Just for terminology, the nodes in the TreeView are OptionsNode objects, the panels (containing the controls that determine the options) are OptionsPanel controls. My UserControl itself is called OptionsView and is the control that contains the treeview as well as a panel that contains the OptionsPanels.
I have some experience in design-time coding, and I have gotten pretty far. The OptionsView control contains a property Panels that returns the ControlCollection of the right side of the split container. The user can add/remove OptionsPanels via this property (and automatically an OptionsNode is created). The property uses a custom CollectionEditor that tells the designer to create instances of type OptionsPanel (instead of just Control which is the usual collection type of ControlCollection). Furthermore, in the CreateInstance method I use the DesignerHost object and its CreateComponent method to create the panels, instead of just creating New OptionsPanel objects. This way the OptionsPanel created is selectable and editable (via property grid) during design-time:
vb.net Protected Overrides Function CreateInstance(ByVal itemType As System.Type) As Object If itemType Is GetType(OptionsPanel) Then
Im doing my first project with WinForms, and Im trying to get the DataBinding working. Theres no database in my project, but I'd like to bind some of the TextBoxes to objects' properties. In the other section of this forum (here) I found this line of C# code which does it: textBox2.DataBindings.Add(new Binding("Text", this.myPerson, "LastName"));
my question is can data binding to object properties be set up during design time (without writing code)? If so, how? P.S. I know how I would set up this binding if in WPF, but I'm forced to use WinForms.
I'm making a quite large database management program(well actually 3 databases) and I am going to be creating a tab page for each database and under that a tab page for each table. each database has +- 200 tables and each of those has between 10 and 50 columns. I am also gonna put controls on each tab page of a table that represent a a row of data.I need very specific tooltips, functions for each table so generating it would be to complicated for me.
I need a automated way of creating controls on design time depending on the column datatype like a rich edit, text box or numeric up or down. and a label that has the same text as the column name It should also rename the name of the control to something appropriate .This can be done using visual studio's database wizard, but last time when I was about 30% done with one database it had already auto generated more than 1000000 lines of code. When I ran my program it took 10 minutes to show the first form and I have a powerful pc.
I vaguely remember something about a hotkey or menu that would group controls together at design time so you could drag 2 or more controls around and they would remain relative to eachother. You could work on something else and come back and the controls would still be grouped.
Does anybody know what this feature is called and how I can access it?
Now as the title says, I'm looking for guidance on some design-time support for the many custom controls I'm working on at the moment.At the moment I'm 3 months in on a Business and Inventory management system for my mothers business. It contains many, many custom controls I had to build from scratch because the ones provided just didn't cut it for what I needed. Now one in particular is a tab page control. Just as the provided TabControl Visual Studios supply's us. It has a lot of design time control. Such as clicking the tabs and adding controls to the panels being brought to front by the corresponding tab being clicked. I had a friend of mine try to show me what I had to do, but the way I had already built my control would have made it difficult - His words, so he never officially showed me anything. If it is true what he said then I can skip that, no problem. But adding the controls to the panels during design time I must have, but cannot seem to find anything through Google searches, text books or even kids majoring in software engineering.
I'm trying to make a collection class for buttons to address them as a whole, only I want to design the buttons at design time, and not add/set their properties programatically at runtime. Each button has its own image, so it doesn't seem right to add a bunch of lines of code which assign the properties when they're always going to be the same thing.Is it possible to create the controls at design time and then add them to an array at runtime? I did this, iterating through the buttons on the form and adding each of them to the class below.The problem is that once they're added they seem to be a different instance because changing their positions has no effect on the design-buttons on the form. Essentially i wanted the collection to be a reference to the items belonging to the form.Is that possible or should I be doing this a different way?[code]
I want to ask a question about adding controls in design time (controls may be any win form control or a user control) and adding the control in run time.
In VB6 I would simply retrieve the user font setting from the .ini file, load into variables and then apply to the appropriate control.
text1.fontbold = userfontbold text1.fontitalic = userfontitalic text1.fontunderline = userfontunderline etc.
I'm struggling to understand how to do this vb.net The following code works, but sets all three at one time
Text1.Font = New Font("Courier", 10, FontStyle.Bold Or FontStyle.Italic Or FontStyle.Underline)Since the user can have many different combinations of settings, I would like to be able to add just one of these properties at a time, but can't seem to figure out how to do it.
In my project, I am trying to change the visible property of my various pictureboxes using a for - next statement. My aim is to get the value of my numericupdown1 control and use this number to make the pictureboxes visible. For example, if this number is 8, the picturebox1, picturebox2, .......8 will be visible. Here is the code I wrote:
I have a class where it's problematic to relay on the properties being serialized in alphabetical order at design time.In other words, property Z must be serialized before property A.The problem arises because property property Z clears property A whenever it changes - which happens in InitializeComponent.I work around this problem by setting a FirstTime flag, but that seems messy.
In my never ending search for more knowledge, I have come across Partial Classes. I was wondering if some of the kind people who actually understand the uses could explain some of them to me. Now I know that when we create a form that we actually create a partial class which the generator rewrites when we add a control or change a property at design-time, and this allows us not to have to worry about setting up the controls ourselves.
I'm making an editor for my app. which allows the user to change properties of the controls including the font.I'm storing the values in a collection but I'm having trouble re-setting the fontstyle from the stored value. I'm storing the font information like so...
In the form design I set up a TableLayoutPanel, 20x20 cells and in cell (1,1) a PictureBox (called Target) containing the image of a small target. The properties box for Target shows some very promising properties, Column and Row - and if you overwrite the values in the properties box, the PictureBox obligingly shifts to the corresponding cell position in th design. However in VB it is not possible to refer to Me.Target.Row or .Column - neither appears during coding in the menu of properties, and deliberately coding either of them produces an error like
Error 1 'row' is not a member of 'System.Windows.Forms.PictureBox'.
1. Why does the properties box show properties that cannot be altered programmatically?
2. How can my program move Target around in the TableLayoutPanel?
I have a base form class that is providing a new property that looks Like this
Public Class BaseForm Private _HappyTime As Boolean Public Property HappyTime() As Boolean
[Code]....
Now when I inherit the BaseForm on a new form, the HappyTime property displays in the properties window as false, and is uneditable.
I've recreated this BaseForm and Inheriting Form in an entirely new soloution and, the HappyTime property is editable and works as expected. For some reason in the existing project (where these changes need to be made) it's not behaving properly.
Environment Information: .Net Framework 3.5, Visual Studio 2010, Win7 x64
I created a custom datacolumn class which inherits from DataColumn and has 2 properties. I then successfully added this custom datacolumn to a datatable. When i try to access the properties through the datatable.columns(index).property, the properties i added are not listed. If i go back in the code to where i instantiate the custom datacolumn i can see the properties here, but not after its added to the datatable.
I am trying to override a property of a subclass of an inherited base class. I've tried to simplify this code as much as possible but am not comfortable enough with my own abilities to simplify anything else without loosing the ability to understand an answer.The property propertyName in the otherClass is currently incorrect. I want to be able to override propertyName in baseClass with the propertyName in otherClass. Is this possible to accomplish?
Public Interface interfaceName Interface iInterfacePropertyName Enum enumName
i created a user control and inherited a textbox.is it possible to remove some of the inherited properties of the user control?like to Multi-Line, PasswordChar etc also at the Form Design, when selecting the user control, there's an arrow on the upper-right which i also want to remove.
on the custom inherited control i created, i noticed that when i bind my custom property to a data column, if that data column returns a value other than Null it always return a datarowstate of modified even if there were no changes. to produce this issue, i have below a sample code for a test inherited control
Imports System.Windows.Forms Imports System.ComponentModel Public Class TestControl
How to change all properties of a form to properties of other but don't change important properties like Owner,Handle, OwnedForms, Parent,HasChildren,Controls and ... .I have a child form that i want it to provide controls of Form.The background form provides Aero frame and child form is a transparent form in it.I want it because I want to draw buttons with system style in Aero in Windows Forms.This is my own code but it does not work good (ForeForm is child form):
For Each Propertry In ForeForm.GetType.GetProperties() Select Case Propertry.Name Case "AeroBackgroundEnabled", "FormBorderStyle", "TransparencyKey", "Parent", "Owner", "ShowInTaskbar", "Handle", "HasChildren", "OwnedFo[code].....
Additionaly:I wrote a great Aero Form.I don't publish current version (1.2) that supports Aero Blur,RealTime Aero Color change,extend Basic theme?
on the custom inherited control i created, i noticed that when i bind my custom property to a data column, if that data column returns a value other than Null it always return a datarowstate of modified even if there were no changes.to produce this issue, i have below a sample code for a test inherited control
Imports System.Windows.Forms Imports System.ComponentModel Public Class TestControl
[code]....
create a form, add the usual objects necessary for data bindings, (datasource, datatable). make sure the data column bound to this TestControl will return non null values.also create a procedure for position changed to catch the datarowstate like below...
Private Sub PositionChanged(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Dim rowstate As DataRowState = DataRowState.Unchanged
[code]....
Note that i used Position - 1 so that when you go to the next record, it will show you the rowstate of the previous record.
I have setup some base forms with some bottons on it The buttons are situated in a panel.Both the panel and the buttons modifer properties have been set up as "Friend".The problem I have is when I inherit these base forms, the buttons seem to jump around by themselves allot
am trying to make use of inheritance to keep consistency in my user control appearance. I created a usercontrol to use as my base design, as a platform to link to a tab as acontainer. To this I added a few framing visual items like a header panel andsome labels.I then created another usercontrol that inherits from my base control, with the intention of adding the necessary items to this derived control to build it into a complete functional usercontrol that I can associate with a tab on my main form. I want to keep the visual appearance consistent across all similar derived controls. Then later if I change the design of the base form, this flows through to the derived controls.