R – How to make RightToLeftLayout work for controls inside GroupBoxes and Panels

localizationnetwinforms

According to MSDN

form.RightToLeftLayout = True;
form.RightToLeft = ifWeWantRTL() ? RightToLeft.True : RightToLeft.False;

is enough to mirrow the form content for RTL languages.

But controls placement gets mirrowed only for controls immediately on the form,
those inside a GroupBox or a Panel are not mirrowed, unless I put them on a TableLayoutPanel or a FlowLayoutPanel fisrt.

This is a lot of manual work to place a TableLayoutPanel inside each GroupBox,
and especially to rearrange the controls (one control per table cell, padding, margin, etc)

Is there an easier way to make mirrowing work for all controls?

Or at least, how can I bypass the rearranging step, for it is quite a task with our number of forms?

Edit: RightToLeft property for each control on the form by default is inherited,
so Panels and GroupBoxes always have the needed RightToLeft setting.
Nevertheless, I tryed to reassign it for them both programmatically and from designer, it did not help.

Best Answer

It does seen that you have quite a nasty problem on your hands. Have played with it for a while and come up with the following:

Making use of a little recursion you can run though all the controls and do the manaul RTL conversion for those controls trapped in Pannels and GroupBoxes.

This is a quick little mock of code that I slapped together. I would suggest you put this in your BaseForm (heres hoping you have one of these) and call on base form load.

private void SetRTL (bool setRTL)
{
    ApplyRTL(setRTL, this);
}

private void ApplyRTL(bool yes, Control startControl)
{
    if ((startControl is Panel ) || (startControl is GroupBox))
    {
        foreach (Control control in startControl.Controls)
        {
            control.Location = CalculateRTL(control.Location, startControl.Size, control.Size);
        }
    }

    foreach (Control control in startControl.Controls)
        ApplyRTL(yes, control);
}

private Point CalculateRTL (Point currentPoint, Size parentSize, Size currentSize)
{
    return new Point(parentSize.Width - currentSize.Width - currentPoint.X, currentPoint.Y);
}

Related Solutions

C# – How to create an Excel (.XLS and .XLSX) file in C# without installing Microsoft Office

You can use a library called ExcelLibrary. It's a free, open source library posted on Google Code:

ExcelLibrary

This looks to be a port of the PHP ExcelWriter that you mentioned above. It will not write to the new .xlsx format yet, but they are working on adding that functionality in.

It's very simple, small and easy to use. Plus it has a DataSetHelper that lets you use DataSets and DataTables to easily work with Excel data.

ExcelLibrary seems to still only work for the older Excel format (.xls files), but may be adding support in the future for newer 2007/2010 formats.

You can also use EPPlus, which works only for Excel 2007/2010 format files (.xlsx files). There's also NPOI which works with both.

There are a few known bugs with each library as noted in the comments. In all, EPPlus seems to be the best choice as time goes on. It seems to be more actively updated and documented as well.

Also, as noted by @АртёмЦарионов below, EPPlus has support for Pivot Tables and ExcelLibrary may have some support (Pivot table issue in ExcelLibrary)

Here are a couple links for quick reference:
ExcelLibrary - GNU Lesser GPL
EPPlus - GNU (LGPL) - No longer maintained
EPPlus 5 - Polyform Noncommercial - Starting May 2020
NPOI - Apache License

Here some example code for ExcelLibrary:

Here is an example taking data from a database and creating a workbook from it. Note that the ExcelLibrary code is the single line at the bottom:

//Create the data set and table
DataSet ds = new DataSet("New_DataSet");
DataTable dt = new DataTable("New_DataTable");

//Set the locale for each
ds.Locale = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
dt.Locale = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;

//Open a DB connection (in this example with OleDB)
OleDbConnection con = new OleDbConnection(dbConnectionString);
con.Open();

//Create a query and fill the data table with the data from the DB
string sql = "SELECT Whatever FROM MyDBTable;";
OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand(sql, con);
OleDbDataAdapter adptr = new OleDbDataAdapter();

adptr.SelectCommand = cmd;
adptr.Fill(dt);
con.Close();

//Add the table to the data set
ds.Tables.Add(dt);

//Here's the easy part. Create the Excel worksheet from the data set
ExcelLibrary.DataSetHelper.CreateWorkbook("MyExcelFile.xls", ds);

Creating the Excel file is as easy as that. You can also manually create Excel files, but the above functionality is what really impressed me.

C# – How to make a textbox that only accepts numbers

Two options:

Use a NumericUpDown instead. NumericUpDown does the filtering for you, which is nice. Of course it also gives your users the ability to hit the up and down arrows on the keyboard to increment and decrement the current value.

Handle the appropriate keyboard events to prevent anything but numeric input. I've had success with this two event handlers on a standard TextBox:

private void textBox1_KeyPress(object sender, KeyPressEventArgs e)
{
    if (!char.IsControl(e.KeyChar) && !char.IsDigit(e.KeyChar) &&
        (e.KeyChar != '.'))
    {
            e.Handled = true;
    }

    // only allow one decimal point
    if ((e.KeyChar == '.') && ((sender as TextBox).Text.IndexOf('.') > -1))
    {
        e.Handled = true;
    }
}

You can remove the check for '.' (and the subsequent check for more than one '.') if your TextBox shouldn't allow decimal places. You could also add a check for '-' if your TextBox should allow negative values.

If you want to limit the user for number of digit, use: textBox1.MaxLength = 2; // this will allow the user to enter only 2 digits

Best Answer

Related Solutions

C# – How to create an Excel (.XLS and .XLSX) file in C# without installing Microsoft Office

C# – How to make a textbox that only accepts numbers

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