I'm making a grid of 30 x 30 buttons with BS_BITMAP representing some numeric value which can be set by clicking on buttons. so should I go creating 900 buttons on a window and or GDI would help to do something same?
Any ideas on setting a row of some column in a grid to some values? would I need a multidimensional array of window handles?
900 controls on a single window does seem a little overkill, Dave - I'd suggest creating a custom control that uses a single window and which renders button-like objects that respond to the usual events, rather than overloading the window with controls. Windows may gripe at having so many controls on a single window - or could perform fairly slowly when the window gets invalidated etc.
Related
ALL,
NSSmallControlSize page has following explanation:
This constant is for controls that cannot be resized in one direction,
such as push buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes, sliders, scroll bars,
pop-up buttons, tabs, and progress indicators. You should use a small
system font with a small control.
Is there any way to set the size for other controls? Namely NSComboBox.
Unfortunately the documentation is not talking about that. It's not even mentioning if it is at all possible.
TIA!
As the page describes, the constant is for controls that cannot be resized in one direction. Combo boxes, like the listed controls, cannot be resized vertically. Therefore it makes sense that the constant would apply to combo boxes.
This can be quickly verified by creating a combo box in Interface Builder, clicking on the Size inspector, and setting its size to Small. Since this works, we can conclude that the small size is compatible with combo boxes.
I'm faced with a problem where I need to display some characters in a tree-view item (those belonging to the Symbol charset) using Symbol font while others in the default System font (Segoi UI on my Windows 7).
Custom draw allows us to draw different items using different fonts, but I would like to draw the same item string using different fonts as it applies to each character in the string as told above.
So, what I've done with not-so-pleasing results w.r.t. drawing performance upon a horizontal scroll when the number of items is more so far is this:
I disabled horizontal scrolling in my tree-view control using TVS_NOHSCROLL style (since I'm using my own scroll bar control inside the tree-view window to handle all horizontal scrolling)
I sub-classed the treeview control and in the sub-classed winproc, I handle the horizontal scroll notification and mouse notification (where I do my own hittesting and send message like TVM_EXPAND and TVM_SELECT as a result of mosue clicks/double-clicks). Also the scroll bar range is set based on how wide my custom drawn string is (the maximum length amongst all items).
I draw the string for each item upon receiving CDDS_ITEMPOSTPAINT using my own fonts for each character in the item.
The above approach (I left out some details for the sake of brevity) works BUT there are some problems which makes me post this question here and look for an alternare way:
Problems:
The horizontal scroll bar control I create is hosted "inside" the tree-view control at the bottom of the tree-view window. However, when the number of items goes beyond what the tree-view client area can accommodate vertically, the last visible tree-view item gets obscured by the scroll bar control. This can be solved by not making the scroll bar a child of the tree-view and hosting it outside the tree-view window just below it. But I don't want to do this since the scroll bar should typically be a child window of the tree-view.
This is the major one. Since I draw the items myself at each horizontal scroll, the drawing performance upon horizontal scrolling is very slow and also leads to flicker upon scrolling.
Any ideas will be much appreciated as I've been grappling with this for the last one week without success.
I can also post the relevant code here if you want to see the approach I took but I'm sure there shoould be a better approach to this and there must be some other people who would've faced this problem and solved it in the past.
Thanks in advance.
Custom-draw allows you to draw items however you want. You are not limited to a single font per item. When you receive the NM_CUSTOMDRAW notification, draw whatever you want on the provided HDC for the specified item. You can draw pieces of text in one font, pieces of text in a different font, etc. Be sure to return CDRF_SKIPDEFAULT so the TreeView itself will not try to draw anything on the item.
#Anurag S Sharma: I tried to edit this into Remy's answer. It's incomplete as is, but addresses your comment/concerns and answers this particularly vexing/useful question...
The problem is that ff I return CDRF_SKIPDEFAULT, Windows does not even draw the +/- buttons (expanding/collapsing) nor the indent lines in the control which I do want Windows to draw. – Anurag S Sharma
To retain the lines, buttons, and icons you can use ExcludeClipRect to mask only the text region and instead of returning CDRF_SKIPDEFAULT, return 0 as if you didn't draw anything. This itself would not be necessary if the text of the tree item was empty, except that the margins of the text will always be drawn by the default handler (note that Microsoft's controls do not always respect clipping shapes, but in this case they do.)
To replicate the classic TreeView label style in your custom draw procedure you need to do something like the following:
HTREEITEM item = (HTREEITEM)p->dwItemSpec;
TreeView_GetItemRect(p->hdr.hwndFrom,item,&p->rc,1);
RECT cr, rc = p->rc; GetClientRect(p->hdr.hwndFrom,&cr);
DrawTextW(p->hdc,text,-1,&rc,DT_CALCRECT|DT_NOPREFIX|DT_NOCLIP);
rc.right+=4; rc.bottom+=2; IntersectRect(&rc,&cr,&rc);
ExtTextOutW(p->hdc,rc.left+2,rc.top+1,ETO_CLIPPED|ETO_OPAQUE,&rc,text,wcslen(text),0);
Apple commonly places +/- buttons below tables (NSTableView), e.g. in the System Preferences for Network or User & Groups. See image below:
How can I place identical buttons below my tables directly in Interface Builder without manipulating any interface elements in my code or subclassing any element classes?
If the table has a fixed width, the easiest way is to just use a segmented control NSSegmentedControl. First add it to your view or window:
Change its Style to Small Square, the Mode to Select None and increase the number of Segments to 4 (or keep it at 3 if you only need + and -):
The +, - and other buttons are predefined images of the AppKit framework (NSAddTemplate and NSRemoveTemplate) and directly available in Interface Builder. E.g. you could setup the first three segments as follows:
For demonstration purposes I made the - segment disabled. Unlike most other buttons, disabling a segment of a segmented control only dims the image/text, it does not change the button background. Only disabling the whole segmented control changes the background (and of course disables all segments).
Of course, the last segment should always be disabled, otherwise it would be clickable and change its background when being clicked. As it contains no image or text, it still looks the same after it has been disabled.
Switch to the size setup and uncheck the Fixed checkbox for all segments, except for the last one, make sure it is checked for the last one:
Unchecking Fixed makes the segment width dynamic, that means it will always match the minimum width required for the content.
Finally place the control directly below the table and resize it to match the table width. Here's the result:
Almost perfect, don't you think?
Things get more difficulty if the table width is dynamic (e.g. the table resizes together with the window resizing). A segmented control doesn't support autoresizing, that means you would have to programmatically change the width of its last segment each time the table is resized. Of course, that is not too hard to do and requires only little code but there is one alternative solution that requires no single line of code.
Decrease the number of segments by one and replace the last segment with a gradient button (NSButton) without title:
Its background looks exactly the same as a segmented control, yet it does support autoresizing to always match the size of the table. There is just one problem: It is clickable and this time disabling it doesn't work as this would change the background. Instead just change its Type to Momentary Change (which means the app wants to control the UI change itself when the button is clicked):
And after the button has been placed correctly and made resizable, the result looks as good as before but this time the table can be resizable and the buttons on the bottom will always fit perfectly.
I am new to Windows Phone Programming. In my application, I Have a listbox which lists the phone contacts. Currently it is listed as a regular list with equal size for list items in the UI.I am looking to modify the front end like this :
I dont want to have different sizes /back ground color for each list items rather a fixed UI and let the lists scroll through it and the list item in the view, at any time, should be displayed as in the picture.
I dont expect any codes as answers but any examples are welcome too, just want to know using what feature this kind of functionality is possible so that i can do my reading!
Thanks,
Deepak
It would be difficult to modify an existing control (ListBox for example) to act like this, so your best bet would probably be an ItemsControl with its RenderTransform set as a TranslateTransform.
If you place a Rectangle (with Fill="Transparent") over the ItemsControl, you can attach handlers to the ManipulationStarted, ManipulationDelta, and ManipulationCompleted events to control the "scrolling" by setting the TranslateTransform's Y offset.
To resize the items in the list there are two options: a custom panel or manual setting.
Custom Panel
You could create a custom Panel implementation that will appropriately resize its Children based on a property you would create to represent the scroll position. Set the ItemsControl to use your panel, and either through binding or attaching a handler to the panel's Loaded event and keeping a pointer to the panel, update the aforementioned property from inside the ManipulationDelta handler.
Manual Setting
From inside of the ManipulationDelta handler, you can also calculate the various heights of the boxes and use MyItemsControl.ItemContainerGenerator.ContainerFromIndex to get the visual for each item and set its height.
I would suggest putting this all inside of a custom UserControl.
You may have issues with clipping using the TranslateTransform but hopefully this will get you started. Unfortunately, this looks like a rather difficult control to try making as your first windows phone project!
So Finally I did manage to find a way to do it.
First approach was as #Murkaeus suggested, Using UserControl and ManipulationDelta event handler. However for some reason the manipulationDelta event was triggered only for 2 finger gestures (Zoom, Pinch..etc), I have no clue why. And after some trying I had to give up on this.
The next approach was using Listbox itself. The source of the Listbox was set as the List( of Models objects) that I create after reading the contact information from phone. The height and color of the listbox item was bound to a property in my model named "scaleLevel" and was accordingly converted by implementing IValueConvertors to give predefined color and height values for different scale levels.
I created an attached property for the scrollviewer vertical offset like mentioned [here] (http://www.scottlogic.co.uk/blog/colin/2010/07/exposing-and-binding-to-a-silverlight-scrollviewer%E2%80%99s-scrollbars/)!
This event is triggered on change of the vertical offset and every time there is a scroll, I find out which listbox item to be enlarged and which reduced based current vertical offset.
Once I have this information, I change the property ("scaleLevel") of the affected items in the List (of Model) (which is bound to listbox height and color). This change is updated in UI using the INotifyPropertyChanged Event.
I have no idea if this the best way of doing it , but it works well and there is no considerable in updating the UI despite the processing involved.
I would like to hear your opinion about the implementation and any other solution which you feel will work better.
I'm building a BattleShip game for WP7 that has board with 250 cells. I need to make each cell clickable, so I thought to put in each cell a button and handle each click as I need.
My question is: do 250 buttons slow the phone? If it does, so what are the alternatives?
Hell yes. 250 UI controls are complete utter madness. The alternative, and correct solution, is to use XNA instead, and developing your game as a real game, and not as a bunch of UI controls.
Yes, 250 buttons will make your application quite slow. Silverlight constructs a visual tree to represent your UI. Each button contains a template which generates various broders, rectangles etc ... for representing visual states.
A couple of alternatives are:
Use a more lightweight visual elements, for example Rectangle. These do not have a Click event, so you can handle MouseLeftButtonUp instead.
Probably the most lightweight approach is not to have an element for each cell at all. Simply handle mouse interactions on a parent element, then determine the grid cell from the click location. The MouseEventArgs contain a e.GetPosition() method that allows you to determine where the mouse click occurred.