I'm looking for a really good dialog resizer class that will stretch and shrink individual items as needed as the screen is resized. Stephan Keil has a good one (DlgResizeHelper) which basically resizes everything by a set ratio, but I'm looking for something smarter.
For example:
Icons should not resize
Single-line text boxes should not be stretched vertically
Buttons should probably stay the same size
Basically I'm looking for something to look at all of the controls, figure out that a static text field is related to a control next/below it and anchor the two together, and resize large controls in a 'smart' way so it looks good.
Are there such frameworks out there? I've been working on one but something ready-made would probably be better.
FOLLOW UP: I'm looking at the suggested solutions. Many of them require you to go in an anchor each control on the dialog. I'm looking for something smart that will figure out what the anchors ought to be, with the ability to manually anchor if the guesses are wrong. Seems like it should be possible -- most humans would agree a static text field next to an edit field should be anchored together. Guess I'm almost looking for a little AI here :)
You can use wxWidgets. It completely replaces MFC, is multi-platform, and gives you a layout-based dialog mechanism.
I use ResizableLib (also does PropertySheets and Pages) off codeproject, IIRC. You set anchor points that determine how the dialog and controls resize or move as the dialog moves.
You can set up to 2 anchors per control, (left, right) so you can move them as the dialog moves, or resize them as it moves. Its very easy to understand, if difficult to get perfectly right :)
I've tried many and finally settled on http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dialog/layoutmgr.aspx. It doesn't do the 'intelligent' layouting that you suggest though. I've never seen that in any library, on any platform - I don't see how it would work without having lots of under the hood magic that'd have to be overridden half of the time anyway.
The Ultimate Toolbox MFC library (here on CodeProject) includes a layout manager. I haven't used it myself, but it looks like it does what you want.
You can look at Professional GUI we use their class library for resizing our dialog controls. I think that is part of their free version.
We use CResize class from CodeGuru to resize all controls automatically. You tell how you want each control to be resized and it does the job for you.
The resize paradigm is to specify how much each side of a control will move when the dialog is resized.
SetResize(IDC_EDIT1, 0, 0, 0.5, 1);
SetResize(IDC_EDIT2, 0.5, 0, 1, 1);
Very handy when you have a large number of dialog controls.
Source code
This is a free solution also from CodeProject
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dialog/dlgresizearticle.aspx
It's just a set of simple macros that position controls as the dialog resizes.
Edit - following the OPs comments. I don't know of any general sizer support like QT/WX for MFC, it doesn't seem to be present in new frameworks like Winforms either.
It is in QT/WX because it is necessary for multiplatform where widgets may be a different size, which explains MS lack of it. But it is also vital for multi-language ports, eg. where the German for cancel is 30 characters long.
Related
Premise: I need to change the colors of the default CScrollBar defined in MFC (thumb + track + arrows), but after doing some research I realized that this isn't exactly an easy task.
Question: would it be better if I tried to draw OVER the existing scrollbar, or should I create a new scrollbar control from scratch?
If I limited myself to drawing on it, I would have the advantage of not having to manage all the messages that deal with the other features of the scrollbar (in addition to the drawing), but it is VERY complicated to find all the points where windows redraws the bar, since the scrollbar is not redrawn only in the OnPaint() method.
If I redo it from scratch, I would no longer have the problem of identifying all the points where the bar is redrawn ... but on the other hand I should reimplement all the scrollbar features from scratch.
I've already looked at this link:
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/14724/Replace-a-Window-s-Internal-Scrollbar-with-a-custo
but the proposed method does not seem to work for newer versions of Windows (from Vista onwards).
Any advice is appreciated, thanks in advance.
We had exactly the same problem and your attempt to overdraw the original scrollbar was what we tried first. We dropped that attempt again due to some issues, which I don't remember in detail (not receiving all mouse or draw messages, flickering, ...). Our solution was some effort, but works now:
We implemented first a class CCustomScrollBar, which is NOT derived from CScrollBar, because the CScrollBar is just a wrapper around the Windows implementation and overwriting OnPaint() doesn't work perfect. And yes, all things must be implemented from scratch.
Second we implemented a template class CWndCustomScrollBar keeping two CCustomScrollBars and managing all around them as a standard window would do with its embedded scrollbars. The free client area then can be achieved via a method GetClientRectWithoutScrollBar() to work similar as a standard window would do.
I'm drawing some graphics and text with GDI in my CScrollView. I need to implement the zooming functionality. I only need the zoom out functionality, no need to zoom in more than what is normally rendered.
Here are my best ideas:
Use MM_ANISOTROPIC mapping mode with SetWindowExt/SetViewportExt... The problem with this approach is that it does not scale text. Is there any way to force MFC to scale the text as well? Only thing I can think of is to set text font size according to the selected zoom value, but I'm not sure whether this will look well after all...
Draw to memory DC, and use StretchBlt to blit to the client area of appropriate size (set with SetScrollSizes...). This will solve the text scaling issue.
Also it is desirable to have antialiasing effect in the process. I think both methods above should accomplish this per se, but I don't know which will look better. Also I will have to implement printing/print-preview functionality later (using MFC's standard implementation from doc/view architecture), so I need the method to be compatible with that.
Need your advice please. Which way to go and why. Maybe other options exist too?..
You really don't want to mess with the mapping mode when you use MFC -- MFC itself already uses it for (at least) the print preview functionality.
I'd see if SetWorldTransform will work for you. At least with vector/TrueType fonts, it will scale the text along with everything else. Note that before SetWorldTransform will work, you need to call SetGraphicsMode with GM_ADVANCED.
I ended up using the second method I proposed in the question, but used DIBs instead of DDBs (and StretchDIBits() instead of StretchBlt()) because it proved to cause less problems, especially when using big bitmaps, and when printing.
I'm having all sorts of size problems with Qt. I am creating my own widgets and using different layouts (generally, I need my own to make them work properly without spending hours on the "powerful" default layouts... which don't lay things out as intended.)
Once I'm done with a widget and its layout though, it doesn't work right. The size is never getting set properly unless I call widget->resize(1, 1); which finally forces a "resize" and makes the widget look correct (i.e. recompute the geometry.) Even the updateGeometry() call has no effect.
This is a dreadful problem when the resize() needs to be called on the parent widget (yuck!) and from what I'm reading should not be necessary were the layouts properly programmed.
Is there a sample that works and is not several thousand of lines long, or does Qt require several thousand lines to make anything work perfectly, even the simplest widget?
What are the minimal functions to be called to make a widget & its layout work at once?
Thank you.
Alexis
P.S. I tried to implement the sizeHint(), minimumSize(), maximumSize(), others that I'm missing? I was hoping that would be enough. Obviously, I also implement the setGeometry() on the layout to resize the children appropriately.
--- addition 1
There is a sample image with a layout that clearly isn't available as is in Qt. The positioning, functions, and colors of the different keys is XML driven and works for any keyboard in the world.
(note, this sample doesn't show the Enter key displayed on two rows and wider below than at the top; more or less, not doable at all with the regular layouts; of course, it works with my version.)
--- clarification
I'm not too sure how to describe the problem better. I was thinking to write a test widget next to see how I can reproduce the problem and then post that and eventually fix it. 8-)
The default layout function that the internal Qt layouts make use of require a lot of coding. I would like to avoid having to copy/paste all of that because for maintenance, it makes it close to impossible.
--- today's findings
As I needed to tweak one of the widgets, I decided to add a VBoxLayout and make it work.
I actually found the problem... One of the widgets in my tree is a QScrollArea and that sizeHint() returns (-1, -1). Not exactly what I'd expect but... whatever you put inside that widget has better know how to compute its width and height or else... it fails.
Looking at the code closely, I could actually compute the width by using the widest width found. Once I used that, the widget would appear (and it actually resizes itself as things change in the list, kinda cool.)
This being said, my earlier comment about having a tree of widgets that auto-resize themselves stands. From the root up to the parents of the leaves in your tree, all of those widgets will need a valid layout. Once I added one in the top widget it resized itself and its children properly (well... in my case up to the QScrollArea, the rest required a bottom to top resizing. Funny how that works!)
--- ah! ha! moment (or: what you find reading the implementation code!)
Today I bumped in another problem which just needed the correct call... I just couldn't find anything worth it in the documentation.
All the objects have a layout now, but a certain parent would not resize properly. Plain simple.
I had a call to the parent as following:
// changes to the children are changing the geometry
parentWidget()->updateGeometry();
Yeah. The docs says that's what you have to do. Nothing happens at all with that call. No idea what it's supposed to do, I did not look at that function. It never did anything for me anyway.
So... I looked at the layout to try to understand how it would send the info up/down. I did not see much except for one interesting comment:
// will trigger resize
This is said of the SetFixedSize mode. To reach that function you need to make the layout for update. Ah! Yes... the layout, not the parent widget... let's try that instead:
parentWidget()->layout()->update();
And voila! It resizes correctly in all cases I have. Quite incredible that the widget updateGeometry() doesn't trigger the same effect...
Although it's possible to do what you want it sounds like the problems you are having are because you're using Qt in a way that it's not meant to be used. Why do you need separate widgets for each key represented on the keyboard?
I see two options, both of which are better in some way:
Use QGraphicsScene and QGraphicsView.
A single custom widget that uses custom drawing to display the keyboard (and likely uses hover for hints).
The first option is probably better. Your keys could then be represented by QGraphicsSimpleTextItem's or even a QGraphicsSvgItem. It also provides a number of standard layouts or you could choose to write your own layout. By default you can use the keyPressEvent or mouseReleaseEvent to respond to user interactions.
I'd highly recommend you take a look at the QGraphicsView examples to get an idea what you can do.
If you go the second route you'll need to record the different key locations so you can respond accordingly as the user moves the mouse around, clicks, etc.
This won't help you with your immediate issue but I wanted to show you a keyboard I made using standard layouts and buttons. It's not perfect and it still won't help you with an enter key that spans two rows but it's not bad. It's resizable too by resizing the window, although I'm not sure if that will be apparent from the images below as SO may be scaling them. (you can view the actual images by opening them in their own tab)
Anyway, this was done using only Qt Designer with no manual coding. It consists of a top level vertical layout with 5 horizontal layouts in it. The buttons are then inserted into one of the 5 horizontal layouts. The size of the keys can be controlled by setting the horizontal and vertical size policies to "ignored" for most of the buttons and then horizontal "minimum" for buttons that you want to be wider. Things can be tweaked by setting min and max size restrictions to buttons. When resized, the buttons will not maintain their relative proportions though, that would probably take some custom programming.
The styling in your example could be approximated pretty well using css style sheets and background images. Still not a minor effort but you should be able to get most of the way there without custom layouts and buttons.
I want to divide the application screen into parts like one part is fixed showing fixed controls & another one is variable which can be changed when user select something. Like in Qt Creator we are having the left side column always fixed & the content of center screen is changing when user is selecting something. I have attached the screen shot. How to do it. if any one is having any idea please help me.
When you speak of the Qt Creator you certainly mean the controls on the left and right. In my opinion, the best thing to implement that are QDockWidgets. Have a look at them in the docs and as Martin said, look at the examples, they are perfect to learn each of the layout and composing issues.
QDockWidgets can be made floatable (undock them from the main window as toolboxes), they can have fixed sides to be docked on and it's easy to use them, because they can be filled with every widget you like. I often use them when I show a file explorer in an application, for example. Just look at the examples and play with it.
If you just want to have QActions visible all the time for the user, you can use a QToolBar.
You normally start with a QMainWindow and then put other toolbars, controls, widgets etc inside that.
Check out the Qt examples that come with the SDK src
I have an MFC application. When running it on Windows 7 I realized that when changing the display percentage to meduium - 125%, I have a TextControl which is cut off (end of sentence doesn't appear.)
How can I fix this?
I could enlarge the size of the control on the dialog, but I'd rather do that via the code.
My application is localized and I woudn't want to change all the dialogs on every language.
In general, the issue is that absolute coordinates are being used for some sizing rather than relative. The framework will initially lay things out correctly in large DPI, it's then up to you to keep things straight through resizes.
You can use a layout framework like this one: Ultimate Toolbox Layout Manager, or you can roll your own.
Here's a common pattern I use:
Define a struct that captures ID, size, location, and layout behavior (anchor top|left|right|bottom) of a control
In the document constructor initialize an array of structs with your desired layout behavior
In OnInitDialog, capture the initial control positions, e.g. for controls set to anchor top left you need to grab the initial distance from the top and left of the parent.
In OnSize, reposition and resize each control according to its layout behavior.
I'm not exactly sure if it helps in your case but the ResizableLib works pretty well for me. You can also skip creating a library and just use the files in your project.
There is a separate article for CResizableDialog which explains in a few easy steps how to implement this for existing dialogs.