need advice with custom control and designer please

[andyjgw]

Hi

I'm a bit new to the designing of custom web page controls and using
them in the properties designer window - need a little advice on a
concept here.

I have two properties in my control - one that is a server name, which
when entered will populate a drop-down list for the second property.

I know that to get a drop-down list I will either need my second
property to be an enum (in which case it will do it auto, but I can't
cast my enum at design-time, it's derived from results querying
property one), or use a custome TypeConverter.

I have the documentation on this and have read Shawn Burke's "make your
components really rad.." article, but my problem is I can't see how my
custom typeconverter class will pick up the value from property one as
I can't pass that value through in my property type definition:

<Bindable(True), _
TypeConverter(GetType(mytypeConverter)) << can't pass a param there?

I can code the lookup no problem, but it's how to get property one
value into the myTypeConverter class I'm having problems with.

I guess it's a simple thing, that I'm just missing the concept of.
After all, it's done in the designer when you pick a database and the
list of tables is populated for example. Just can't see what I'm
missing here...

Thanks in advance for any advice - any code snippets/pointers showing
how one property affects the values in another would be useful thanks


AW

 

[andyjgw]

Sorry, I should have mentioned that I've set
RefreshProperties(RefreshProperties.All) on property one, but when
debugging this I can see that when I change the value of property one,
property two isn't re-calculated.

Anything I'm missing here? It must be something pretty simple I
think....

Original post:
I'm a bit new to the designing of custom web page controls and using
them in the properties designer window - need a little advice on a
concept here.

I have two properties in my control - one that is a server name, which
when entered will populate a drop-down list for the second property.

I know that to get a drop-down list I will either need my second
property to be an enum (in which case it will do it auto, but I can't
cast my enum at design-time, it's derived from results querying
property one), or use a custome TypeConverter.

I have the documentation on this and have read Shawn Burke's "make your
components really rad.." article, but my problem is I can't see how my
custom typeconverter class will pick up the value from property one as
I can't pass that value through in my property type definition:

<Bindable(True), _
TypeConverter(GetType(mytypeConverter)) << can't pass a param there?

I can code the lookup no problem, but it's how to get property one
value into the myTypeConverter class I'm having problems with.

I guess it's a simple thing, that I'm just missing the concept of.
After all, it's done in the designer when you pick a database and the
list of tables is populated for example. Just can't see what I'm
missing here...

Thanks in advance for any advice - any code snippets/pointers showing
how one property affects the values in another would be useful thanks

 

[andyjgw]

Oops. Sorry, please dis-regard that last post. The re-calculation isn't
the problem of course, it's the parameter-passing of the value of
property1 to the TypeConverter of property2 that is causing me
trouble...

Don't know what I was thinking with that last one... :/