I have a program that is very much like a wizard. Several forms are shown one after another and a result is produced at the end. There are several different calculation engines so what I had planned was that at startup the program would use reflection to find all the calc engines in the app directory. This is working great. The user can choose which engine they need and that engine is loaded dynamically.
The problem is that I cannot find a way to show these forms as modal. It would be nice to just say Show step 1 and then have the code wait until that form is finished. If this is not possible, is there an elegant way to fake modal behavior? Or should I forget modal altogether and use delegates to have each form notify the application when the user chooses to go "Back" or "Next"?
If there is a good solution that uses a non-MDI parent, that is fine as well. I only need a window that can host a pulldown menu and these wizard-like forms. I never would have thought this would be so difficult, but I think I'm still thinking in VB6 and not seeing a simple C# solution.
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Why don't you design your pages on various frames in a tabcontrol, then, at runtime, programatically set each frame's container/parent (not sure which) to be the form. You will also have set the actual tabcontrol to be invisible. That way you can design your layout easily all on one form (using the tabs for design purposes alone).
Hope this makes sense.
Smg.
The answer to the question "is there a way to contain a modal dialog box within the client area of an MDI form (or approximate that behavior easily?)" is NO, NOT WITH THE STANDARD CONTROLS. I think you need to write your own code, controls, forms, etc. to be able to do this. My suggestion: do it without an MDI parent
Why not just set all of your forms on separate panels (standard web forms I know... but still) and then do a view from one panel to another. Set your submit button on the bottom of each panel, and then assign visibility and functionality to each panel as they navigate through the wizard.
if (viewID == 0) //1st setting
{
pnlForm1.Visible = false;
pnlForm2.Visible = true;
pnlForm3.Visible = false;
pnlForm4.Visible = false;
}
if (viewID == 1) //billing info
{
pnlForm1.Visible = false;
pnlForm2.Visible = false;
pnlForm3.Visible = true;
pnlForm4.Visible = false;
}
if (viewID == 2) //categories
{
pnlForm1.Visible = false;
pnlForm2.Visible = false;
pnlForm3.Visible = false;
pnlForm4.Visible = true;
}
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by: TheAvengerPosted on 2003-09-01 at 05:55:05ID: 9261364
Every form in .Net has a method called ShowDialog() which "Shows the form as a modal dialog box." with or without a parent. The form is then closed by pressing the respective (assigned by you) accept or cancel buttons (see Form.AcceptButton and Form.CancelButton). The method ShowDialog() returns a result showing which button was pressed. So you can put two buttons on the form, one for next, one for back. Then assign the next button as accept button, the back button as cancel button and then open the form with ShowDialog(). Check the result and react in the proper way based on your logic. Be careful with closing the form with the X button in the upper right corner which will also close the form.