Can't Resize Custom Control

[paul reed]

Hello,

I have a web custom control that is a tree view.

Once I place this control on my aspx page, I am not able to resize it. The
ancors are fixed. It uses a designer that I got help with on this newsgroup,
but I don't see why this would prevent me from resizing the control. I
confirmed this by commenting out the use of the designer and I am still not
able to resize the control.

Also, when loading my treeview, the size of the tree control just grows and
grows, it doesn't stay within the bounds of the table I have it in. No
scroll bars ever appear. The table is not generated as part of the creation
of the control but is already on the panel.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone might be able to provide.

Paul Reed

 

[Alessandro Zifiglio]

can you post the code in your designer class. Without that its pretty much
impossible to see where you are going wrong. It should resize, if your using
a designer that is ;P

 

[Jeffrey Tan[MSFT]]

Hi Paul,

I have reviewed you post, I will do some research on this issue.

I will reply to you ASAP.

Thanks for your understanding.

Best regards,
Jeffrey Tan
Microsoft Online Partner Support
Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security
This posting is provided "as is" with no warranties and confers no rights.

 

[Paul Reed]

Thanks,

Here is my designer code. It works fine, just shows the control when
dragged from the toolbox and placed on a form as a rectangle with
borders and a title.

Public Class WebFieldPickerDesigner
Inherits System.Web.UI.Design.ControlDesigner

Public Overrides Function GetDesignTimeHtml() As String

Dim sw As String = "<div style="" BORDER-RIGHT:1px solid;" + _
"BORDER-TOP: 1px solid; BORDER-LEFT:1px solid;
BORDER-BOTTOM: 1px solid;" + _
"WIDTH: 200px; HEIGHT: 100px"">UDB Field Picker
Control</div>"

Return sw.ToString()

End Function
End Class

Paul Reed
www.jacksonreed.com

 

[Alessandro Zifiglio]

Paul, Your designer class is associated with your control. When you resize
the component in your designer you are actually resizing your control. In
your div element sample, you are providing a fixed size which your designer
is unable to manipulate,and this is why you are unable to resize it. In the
sample below I'm getting a reference to the component your designer is
associated with and passing its width and height. Now you are able to resize
the div and the new width and height will be always be displayed in your
grid

You can further provide the styling etc, also note that the base
implementation of GetDesignTimeHtml invokes the Render method of the
control, thereby rendering the same HTML at design time as at run time. If
this is the case let me know and i'll post some sample code.


Public Overrides Function GetDesignTimeHtml() As String
' Component is the instance of the component or control that
' this designer object is associated with. This property is
' inherited from System.ComponentModel.ComponentDesigner.
'Replace WebCustomControl1with the name of your custom control
Dim Instance As WebCustomControl1 = CType(Component,
WebCustomControl1)

Dim sw As String = "<div style=""" & "BORDER-RIGHT:1px
solid;BORDER-TOP: 1px solid;" & _
"BORDER-LEFT:1px solid;BORDER-BOTTOM: 1px solid;" & "WIDTH:" &
Instance.Width.ToString & _
";HEIGHT:" & Instance.Height.ToString & """>UDB Field Picker
Control</div>"
Return sw.ToString()
End Function

 

[Paul Reed]

Jeffrey,

Thanks...I got a partial answer to my question. One gentleman said to
avoid not being able to resize, in the designer instead of hard coding
the Height and Width, to do something like "Instance.Height.ToString"
and "Instance.Width.ToString". This worked.

However, I still wouldn't mind getting help yet on the second half of
the question. That is, once my tree renders on my page, as I click the
node elements and keep drilling down, the control just keeps expanding.
It never renders any scroll bars. I tried dropping the control into a
table thinking it would stay within the bounds of the table, but it just
expanded the table as well. Perhaps in the CreateChildControls I should
stick the treeview inside of a DIV?

Thanks in advance,

Paul Reed
www.jacksonreed.com

 

[Paul Reed]

Alessandro,

Thanks so much, that worked just fine.

My initial question also had a second part, if I may be so bold

I drag and drop my control into a table I have on my page. At run time,
my tree loads as expected, but as I click down through the nodes, the
tree just keep expanding and expanding. I would have expected scroll
bars to appear and for the control to stay within the boundaries of the
table.

Thanks in advance,

Paul Reed
www.jacksonreed.com

 

[Alessandro Zifiglio]

Hi paul, I were in a hurry and totally forgot about the second part of your
question, so to answer :

YOu are partially right when wanting to wrap your treeview within div tags.
Your div element needs to have a fixed width and height. And when the inner
content of your div element, that is whatever you have inside this div
exceeds and starts to grows beyond that fixed width and height you get the
scrollbars. You have to supply the css overflow attribute to your div, heres
a sample :

<div style="overflow: auto; width: 100px;height: 100px">
<!-- Your tree nodes in here, and if the width is bigger than the fixed
width/height supplied you get horizontal, vertical scrollbars,
espectively -->
</div>

 

[Paul Reed]

Alessandro,

Thanks again...I don't know what I would do without all the help on the
newsgroups.

Regards,

Paul Reed
www.jacksonreed.com

 

[Paul Reed]

Hi,

Ok...I think I am almost there. Now, I am wrapping that DIV tag around
my control in the CreatChildControls method. Things seem to be working
ok...I get the scrollbar.

However, different screens use my control. On screen might want the
control all down the left side. Someone else might want it just in the
upper right quadrant. The problem is, by setting fixed Height and Width
in the DIV tag, for those that want a much longe version of the control,
they end up being constrained by the parms set in the DIV tag...the
control is never larger than the boundaries set there.

It is almost as if we need assess to the width and height of the
control, then in the CreateChildControls method, dynamically determine
the width and height based on the actual width and height of the
control. Problem is, I don't see how to get access to the height and
width from within the CreateChildControls method. I tried "Me.Height"
but it is 0...same for width.

Am I making sense? I am not sure if I am describing it correctly.

Regards,

Paul Reed
www.jacksonreed.com

 

[Paul Reed]

I figured it out myself. In fact...Me did have the height and width. So,
when wrapping the control in DIV, I just used the instances H/W.
Everything works great.

Paul Reed
www.jacksonreed.com

 

[Jeffrey Tan[MSFT]]

Hi Paul,

Oh, I am glad you got what you want. Also, thanks Alessandro for his
contribute in newsgroup!

Yes, newsgroup needs all the people's participation and discuss!

If you have any further concern, please feel free to post, we will help
you.

Best regards,
Jeffrey Tan
Microsoft Online Partner Support
Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security
This posting is provided "as is" with no warranties and confers no rights.

 

[Jiho Han]

Let me inject something here...
I was doing something similar and I needed my control have a scrollbar as
needed as well. The problem for me is that I can't set the size of the DIV
tag. That is because the DIV is set to expand to take up any slack.

As an example, let's say that you have a table with three rows:

<table height="100%">
<tr><td height="22">header row</td></tr>
<tr><td height="100%"><mycontrol></td></tr>
<tr><td height="22">footer row</td></tr>
</table>

As you can see, when the browser window is resized, the second row is set to
resize with it. And therefor my DIV tag that surrounds my control also has
HEIGHT="100%" style set.

So far what I've tried to do is to figure out the initial height at run-time
in javascript and reset the height of the div tag to that fixed value. So
if the content inside were to overflow, the DIV tag would generate a
scrollbar for my control. Sounds all good except in practice, it doesn't
seem to work. Maybe I'm accessing the wrong style properties as there are
so many different "size" properties such as height, offsetHeight,
clientHeight, scrollHeight, etc.

Or maybe I'm just going about it the wrong way?

Thanks much.
Jiho