Container User Controls

rolandatem · October 5th, 2007, 03:42 PM

Hello All,

I am having trouble finding some help on the internet, perhaps my search criteria is not specific enough.

Anyway, what I'm looking to do, is find out how to create a user control that is a container, kinda of like a master page in asp.net. Where I can design the control look, yet there is a part specified for content for a desktop app.

This is something that I want to build so that I can add controls to its container part on design time, not run time.

A good example of this, is the outlook bar. I could have a main container, perhaps a panel object. Then I would drag a few of my container type user controls in it, and for each of them, put whatever I was in design time in it.

I can do this in pure code at run-time, but I could see this being a lot easier and less tedious if I could find a way to visually just drag my control off the toolbox, then drag whatever normal .net control into the container part of my control.

I'm sorry if I dont make much sense, this is perhaps why I havent found my answer googling ;p

samjudson · October 6th, 2007, 08:02 AM

My search for "asp.net user container" gave me this link as the first hit: http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/pa...econtainer.asp

I believe the hard part is not creating a user control that contains children control, but the design time interface.

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

rolandatem · October 11th, 2007, 02:54 AM

Skimming through that link, im not sure if that's what I'm looking for (although I only skimmed).

Just to be a little more descriptive, this is what I mean:
1.) I create a desktop app project.
2.) I create a user control, this control contains a label and a panel in it (panel background color white to identify where its at), the label is just there to show that the whole is a control, not necessary.
3.) I go back to the main form of the desktop app and drag over an instance of the user control.
4.) I grab a button or any other object really and drag it over to the panel of the user control.
5.) I move the user control some, but notice the button was not put inside the page of the user control, but acts as a child control of the main form.

So (in this example), what I really wanted was to have the button become a child control of the panel in the user control.

I can add this on runtime and add event handlers programmatically, but I would like the ease of just dragging the button into the panel (to be a child of it), and use the regular double-click to create event handler code, etc.

Thanks again for the reply, maybe I can look through the link you showed me and see if theres something I can extract from that.

samjudson · October 11th, 2007, 04:35 AM

Didn't realise you meant Winforms.

I changed my google search and came up with this:

http://www.codeproject.com/vb/net/Cu...nerControl.asp

Again, no idea if this does what your after but I'd recommend downloading the sample code and having a look. I suspect that trying to get it to work in the designer is going to be very hard indeed.

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

samjudson · October 11th, 2007, 04:45 AM

After a bit more googling (which you could have been doing yourself btw) the key to your problem is adding the following attribute to your user control:

Code:

[Designer("System.Windows.Forms.Design.ParentControlDesigner,System.Design", typeof(System.ComponentModel.Design.IDesigner))]
public partial class UserControl1 : UserControl
{
... etc

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

rolandatem · October 12th, 2007, 08:03 PM

Nice, thats getting close to what I wanted. I think I can work with this and figure out what I'm looking for. The only thing wrong with this, is that the control I want to add to the user control becomes a child of the user control instead of the panel (also goes behind the panel, just a z-index type issue I can figure out). I really appreciate your help on helping me on the path that I need to take.