User controls do not properly fit on the screen

Question

Hi,

My application has several controls. Like in one screen has TreeView on left side, GridView with paging in the middle and 4 buttons at right side. The controls properly appear when the form is in a maximized state, but if I minimize it the controls do not properly fit on the screen.

I tried with different different tricks like table layout.. in dat I added a panel, etc...

But I could not solve the problem.

How can I create such type of screens which fits independently of size of my window?

Thanks

Answer 1

I had the same problem a while ago. In my case i had a Button and a ListView within a GroupBox that was inside a SplitContainer, which was within a UserControl on a TabControl. I wanted the button on the top right located and anchored and the ListView took the space leftover, so i couldn't dock it. Instead it was anchored in all four places.

In my case my button and the listview are worked and behaved correctly in the designer, but in my running app the button was positioned to far on the right and the ListView size had also a too much width.

For a first bugfix i did some iterations about positioning the button in the designer a little more to the left, check it running mode, re-align the button in designer from the impression i had in the last run.

So i got it to work and started over with some other thing i had to do in my app. After a while i got a new feature request and needed another button within this messy thing. This time i did a complete rebuild of the gui elements on a new usercontrol, just to see if the problem reappears. To my amazement this gui mock just behaved as expected.

Within my code i didn't anything about changing the location, size, anchors, docks, etc. So the problem had to be within the InitializeComponents() code created by the designer.

I started with a diff of both versions and couldn't see any big differences (there were a lot of them, but only minors like size, location or name). So i started to put code from my crazy usercontrol into the mock and running the mock in my app. After several copies the problem also appears in my mock, so i got the root cause of the problem.

What do you think, which property leaded to the crazy behaviour?
It was the MinimumSize of my SplitContainer!

So to get really the root cause of your problem you should start over with an empty UserControl (or Form) and just place all the elements on it with the desired behaviour (size, location, anchor, dock).

Nothing more!

Then test if this mock behaves the way you want and if not, post this code here and tell us what you expected to see.