Nested flowlayout panel not wrapping

Question

I've got a FlowLayoutPanel with properties:

• Dock = Fill (in a usercontrol)
• FlowDirection = TopDown
• WrapContents = false

I do it this way so that each item added to the panel gets added to the bottom.

The items that I add to this panel are usercontrols which themselves have FlowLayoutPanels on them, however they have the standard behaviour (LeftToRight, WrapContents = true). The problem that I'm having is that the interior usercontrol's FlowLayoutPanel isn't resizing to fill the outer control, but when I set autosizing to true on these controls, then the panel won't wrap its contents - which is a known problem apparently.

If it helps visualize what I'm trying to do, it looks like this:

    ______________________________
    | __________________________ | Outer box = exterior flowlayout 
    | |Text____________________| |    (TopDown, NoWrap)
    | | # # # # # # # # # # # #| |
    | | # # # #                | | Interior boxes = usercontrols with text and a 
    | |________________________| |   flowlayoutpanel on them 
    | __________________________ |    (LeftToRight, Wrap)
    | |Text____________________| |   
    | | # # # # # # # # # # # #| |   # = pictures
    | | # #                    | |
    | |________________________| |
    |____________________________|

Answer 1

I don't think you can dock controls in a FlowLayoutPanel, unless you subclass LayoutEngine and make your own version of the pane using your custom engine. However, there's an awesome solution to this problem. Use a TableLayoutPanel! Since you only want 1 column, it's very easy to use a TableLayoutPanel for this purpose.

The only caveat is that the TLP needs to have 0 rows initially, and you then add the user controls programmatically. And the trick is to dock the user control to Top. This works:

public partial class Form1 : Form
{
    public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();

        TableLayoutPanel tlp1 = new TableLayoutPanel();
        this.Controls.Add(tlp1);
        tlp1.Dock = DockStyle.Fill;

        for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++)
        {
            UserControl1 uc = new UserControl1();
            uc.Dock = DockStyle.Top;
            tlp1.Controls.Add(uc);
        }
    }
}

UserControl1 in this case was a user control with a FLP on it which had a bunch of buttons in it so I could confirm that the docking and flowing would work.