I'm playing around with my first lightswitch application and am trying to change the size of a list control. Does anyone know how to do that? I've tried:
this.FindControl("PersonList").SetProperty("Height", 200);
but get told the height property doesn't exist. I've had a quick look thorugh the lightswitch namespaces in the object browser but so far haven't found anything useful.
That code looks like it should work (just change 200 to 200.0 - Height is a double). I've just verified almost identical code on my machine.
Here's a few things you can try:
Ensure you're using the right name for the control - Select the control in Visual studio and check the name in the properties window. Lightswitch creates lots of name variations, and it's easy to miss that the actual name is "PersonList2" for example.
Ensure that you've selected "Pixels" for height control in the properties window for the control
Once you can access the Height property it won't actually do anything until you set the control alignment to "Top". If it remains on "Stretch" it will ignore anything written to the Height property.
Let me know if you still have trouble getting this to work.
Related
I'm trying to handle background color properly in a dynamically generated property sheet in dynamically generated property pages in win32 api using MFC (though I expect my question is general, and not restricted to MFC, but since my code and examples use it, it's germane to my question anyway).
So we have a:
CPropertySheet
containing multiple
CPropertyPage
I generate the contents of any given page dynamically - from file resources using a custom dialog definition language - all irrelevant other than to say - a list of controls and their coordinates is created within a given page, and the page is resized to accommodate them. This logic is working beautifully.
However, what doesn't work is that the controls and background of each page draws using the dialog default color/brush.
I've tried a number of ways to attempt to force it to draw using the white color/brush that a hard-coded property sheet / page would.
There are two important pieces to this:
Page Background
Control (on the page) background
For #1, I've tried:
acquire the background brush from parent window class (it's dialog bkgrd) (same is true if I do this and ask the tab control)
change the property page to use WS_EX_TRANSPARENT (PreCreateWindow is not called by the framework when generating a page viz PropertySheet::AddPage)
For #2, I've tried:
overriding OnWndMsg / WM_CTLCOLORSTATIC to forward that request to (A) the parent (sheet), and (B) to the tab control (which is what wants the white in the first place).
However, anytime I use any of the above "ask for the background / forward the request" up the chain to either the sheet or the tab control - I get the dialog background color, never the white I'd expect.
Using Spy64, I can see that for a fully hardcoded property sheet / page - that the only discernable differences I can see is that the dialog window created in AddPage (or its moral equivalent) has WS_CHILD instead of mine which has WS_POPUP (the rest of the styles appear to be the same, such as WS_VISIBLE|DS_3DLOOK|DS_FIXEDSYS|DS_SETFONT|DS_CONTROL and WS_EX_CONTROLPARENT.
So, other than the WS_CHILD, I see no significant differences from what I'm creating and from another property sheet that works properly from a standard resource (i.e. hard coded).
I'm also flummoxed as to how this works normally anyway - since forwarding things like the ctrlcolor message doesn't respond correctly - and asking for the windows background colors similar doesn't - then how is it in a standard case the background colors of controls and pages comes out as white, and not dialog background?
Any ideas or help would be appreciated - I'm kind of running out of ideas...
When Visual Styles were added in Windows XP they really wanted to show off this new feature so they made the tab background a gradient (really a stretched image) instead of a single color and this caused problems in old applications that did custom drawing with the dialog brush as the background.
Because of this, only applications with a comctl32 v6 manifest got the new look but there was a problem; old propertysheet shell extensions would load in new applications (including Explorer) and things would look wrong.
To work around this they also require you (or your UI framework) to call EnableThemeDialogTexture(.., ETDT_ENABLETAB) to get the correct tab page look.
As if things are not tricky enough, there is a undocumented requirement that you also need a button or a static control on the page!
If you have custom controls they have to call DrawThemeParentBackground when you draw if they are partially transparent.
Turns out my old code had defined an ON_WM_ERASEBKGND handler - and removing that (and all of my above attempts) makes it work.
So simply doing NOTHING is the correct answer. D'oh!!!
I'm leaving my shame here in case someone else trips on this! [Whoops!]
(Still interested if anyone has deeper insight into how this mechanism works under the hood)
So I'm writing a script to modify quickly a VB6 application's interface with COM controls. (Created in C# .net). Most of it works fine, but some panels are giving me a lot of trouble.
Basically, I open the .frm file and read it, and when I find some controls I modify their values or insert new things. When I find a panel, I create a different panel around it so it looks better. I'll put, say Top = 2340 in the file for my new element. If I open the .frm in notepad, I can clearly see that the value of Top is at 2340. Once I open VB6, the panel's top value is at Top = 8190. It also modifies the Left value, but nothing else. If I save and exit vb6, then reopen the .frm in notepad, the Top value will be saved at 8190.
Why does VB6 uses different values than the ones in the .frm file? Is it trying to avoid elements stacking on top of each other ? What is happening between reading the file and opening it, that forces a different value of the Top property?
Just a theory, but I believe the issue is that the ScaleMode property isn't setup right. By default, unless the container window has the property, it'll be set to Twips. So what may be valid under certain containers won't be valid in other containers.
The MDIForm container, for example, forces Twips, and may even re-position objects based on alignment.
If this is the form itself, which I don't think it is but worth mentioning, make sure the StartUpPosition is properly set to 0 (Manual).
I've been trying trying to adjust the width of the VS 2008 Report Server user parameter text box at runtime to expand or grow or at least wrap somewhat long text.
I've been looking into manually doing so in the web code for the parameter sections but haven't figured it out yet. Any suggestions?
Its said there are options in the designer view but the size attributes do not directly affect this at runtime. It has a scrollbar but is short and that is and seems inefficient for users who will run these reports.
Heres the XML portion I thought I could manually change.
<ReportParameters>
<ReportParameter Name="ProjectTypeIDs">
<DataType>String</DataType>
<Prompt>Project Type</Prompt>
<ValidValues>
<DataSetReference>
<DataSetName>ProjectTypes</DataSetName>
<ValueField>ProjectTypeID</ValueField>
<LabelField>ProjectTypeName</LabelField>
</DataSetReference>
</ValidValues>
<MultiValue>true</MultiValue>
</ReportParameter>
Thanks ahead of time!
I'm looking for a way to check to see that a window I am creating is visible and entirely on one monitor. I have seen too many programs do nasty things when they try to restore their position and the place no longer exists and I don't want my program to be vulnerable to this.
How do I find the information on the actual layout of the monitors?
The Screen class contains a lot of functionality for this.
You should check for yourself if a form is outside the Bounds of the Screen, but this is pretty straightforward:
if (!Screen.GetWorkingArea(myWindow).Bounds.Contains(myWindow.Bounds)) {
// Adjust location
}
Just a small syntax correction, or perhaps an update in Visual Studio 2012:
if (!Screen.GetWorkingArea(myWindow).Contains(myWindow.Bounds))
{
//Adjust location
}
I'm running into a problem trying to anchor a textbox to a form on all 4 sides. I added a textbox to a form and set the Multiline property to True and the Anchor property to Left, Right, Up, and Down so that the textbox will expand and shrink with the form at run time. I also have a few other controls above and below the textbox.
The anchoring works correctly in Visual Studio 2005 (i.e. I can resize the form and have the controls expand and shrink as expected), but when I run the project, the bottom of the textbox is extended to the bottom of the form, behind the other controls that would normally appear beneath it. This problem occurs when the form loads, before any resizing is attempted. The anchoring of the textbox is correct for the top, left, and right sides; only the bottom is malfunctioning.
Has anybody heard of this and if so, were you able to find a solution?
Thanks!
UPDATE:
Here is some of the designer code as per Greg D's request (I am only including the stuff that had to do with the textbox itself, not the other controls):
Friend WithEvents txtRecommendationText1 As System.Windows.Forms.TextBox
<System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepThrough()> _
Private Sub InitializeComponent()
Me.txtRecommendationText1 = New System.Windows.Forms.TextBox
' ...snip...
'txtRecommendationText1
Me.txtRecommendationText1.Anchor = CType((((System.Windows.Forms.AnchorStyles.Top Or System.Windows.Forms.AnchorStyles.Bottom) _
Or System.Windows.Forms.AnchorStyles.Left) _
Or System.Windows.Forms.AnchorStyles.Right), System.Windows.Forms.AnchorStyles)
Me.txtRecommendationText1.Location = New System.Drawing.Point(4, 127)
Me.txtRecommendationText1.Multiline = True
Me.txtRecommendationText1.Name = "txtRecommendationText1"
Me.txtRecommendationText1.Size = New System.Drawing.Size(223, 149)
Me.txtRecommendationText1.TabIndex = 10
End Sub
ANOTHER UPDATE:
The textbox I originally posted about was not inherited from a baseclass form (although it was added to a custom User Control class; I probably should have mentioned that earlier), but I recently ran into the same problem on a totally unrelated set of controls that were inherited from a baseclass form. It's easy to blame these problems on possible bugs in the .NET framework, but it's really starting to look that way to me.
Is your Form localized? Check the resource files for an entry with Textbox.Size, delete is and reset the size.
Is your Form inherited and is the Textbox on the baseform? Try setting the Textbox's access modifier to Protected or Public.
Have you implemented custom resize logic? Turn it off and see if the problem is still there.
Have you entered a Textbox.MinimumSize/MaximumSize? Remove or change the value.
It might also be a combination of these things...
Does the form snap back to the expected layout when you resize it after it's been initialized weirdly? Also, have you set a Height or MinimumHeight/MaximumHeight property for the text box?
If possible, a few snippets from the designer code might be useful. :)
One possibility that I've run into in the past is DPI. If you're running/testing your code on a machine with a different DPI setting than the machine that you're developing on, you may observe some strange things.
The anchor functionality essentially establishes a fixed distance between the edge of a control and the edge of the control's parent. Is your textbox embedded within another control (e.g., a panel) that doesn't have its anchors properly set? Right clicking on the text box in the designer should pop up a menu that lets you select any controls that exist underneath it, also.
Does your program include any custom resize logic, or does it modify the size of the textbox programmatically outside of designer-generated code? That might also result in weird behavior. I've assumed maintenance for a number of pieces of software at my organization where the original developers spent a great deal of time implementing (buggy) resize logic that I had to tear out so that I could just let the designer-generated code do the work for me.
The textbox I originally posted about was not inherited from a baseclass form (although it was added to a custom User Control class; I probably should have mentioned that earlier), but I recently ran into the same problem on a totally unrelated set of controls that were inherited from a baseclass form. It's easy to blame these problems on possible bugs in the .NET framework, but it's really starting to look that way to me.
It's very likely because of the 'AutoScaleMode' property being set in InitializeComponent(). Try setting it to 'None' and see if that fixes it. I've had these problem a couple of times now.