Question

Here is an overview of my application:

It is basically a cook book. The user can create a cookbook and then create recipes within that cookbook. I have a class CookBook and a class Recipe. CookBook keeps track of what recipes are associated with the cook book and Recipe keeps track of the contents of the recipe.

For the UI, i have a treeview where it will display the recipes that are in the CookBook. I have a TabControl that will display the tabs associated with each recipe. The tabs are dynamically created by the user during run time.

When the user clicks on one of the recipes, i want the TabControl to show the tabs related to that specific recipe. When the user clicks on a different recipe i want the tabs for the previous selection to go away and the tabs of the current selection to appear. (side note: I will be saving the contents of the tab and stuff to a file later, for saving purposes)

I want the Recipe class to contain the details about the TabControl (how many tabs there are for the recipe, title of each of the tabs, contents of the tabs). But i do not want Recipe to be responsible for creating the Tabs or TabControl.

My questions is, how do i accomplish the bolded section above? What are people’s opinions and experience with this type of problem? What are the best practices for this type of problem?

THANKS!

Answer 1

I hope that the following code gives you an idea

public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();

        Recipe r1 = new Recipe() { Text = "Re1" };
        Recipe r2 = new Recipe() { Text = "Re2" };
        Recipe r3 = new Recipe() { Text = "Re3" };


        listBox1.Items.Add(r1);
        listBox1.Items.Add(r2);
        listBox1.Items.Add(r3);


        tabControl1.TabPages.Add(new AdvancedTabPage() { Recipe = r1,Text=r1.ToString() });
        tabControl1.TabPages.Add(new AdvancedTabPage() { Recipe = r2, Text = r2.ToString() });
        tabControl1.TabPages.Add(new AdvancedTabPage() { Recipe = r3, Text = r3.ToString() });

        listBox1.SelectedIndexChanged += new EventHandler(listBox1_SelectedIndexChanged);

    }

    void listBox1_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        if (listBox1.SelectedItem != null)
            foreach (AdvancedTabPage ad in tabControl1.TabPages)
            {
                if (ad.Recipe == listBox1.SelectedItem)
                {
                    tabControl1.SelectedTab = ad;
                    break;
                }
            }

    }

    public class AdvancedTabPage : System.Windows.Forms.TabPage
    {
        public Recipe Recipe{get;set;}


    }

    public class Recipe
    {
        public string Text = "";

        public override string ToString()
        {
            return Text;
        }
    }