Question

I am attempting to write a ‘User Control’ in WinForms .NET (not ASP.NET). The control is relatively simple. It will contain a label, a button, and a DataGridView.

However, the control needs to be able to instantiate itself, i.e. when the user clicks the button (of the parent control) at least 1 nested (children) control of the same type will be displayed underneath (kind of like a Tree)

I am having no success writing such a recursive control using a ‘User Control’. A StackOverflow Exception occurs when instantiating MyControl within it’s own constructor.

Therefore, I am leaning towards using a ‘Custom Control’, hoping it can handle the instantiation of itself (maybe in the Paint event??). Alot more work has to go into a Custom Control however, so I don’t want to go down this path if it’s going to take forever. I am on a tight deadline.

Anybody done this using a Custom Control or have any solid ideas on how to create a recursive control?

By the way, this control would be used in a fairly finite number of recursive combinations, so maybe it would be better to create a separate control for each parent/children scenario? I am thinking that would result in at least 10 separate user controls.

thanks for your help

UPDATE (here is my initial attempt at a stop condition per your feedback, but this is still causing children to be created indefinitely) :

  public partial class CustomX : UserControl     {         private IList _children = new List();          public CustomX()         {             InitializeComponent();              Recurse(0);          }          private void Recurse(int childCount)         {             if (childCount  

Answer 1

The problem is probably that the child control also instantiates a child control. There has to be a stop condition or controls will be generated until the stack overflows.

This should work:

public partial class CustomX : UserControl     {         private IList _children = new List();          public CustomX(int depth)         {             InitializeComponent();             if(depth > 0)             {                 CustomX child = new CustomX(depth-1);                 this.Controls.Add(child)             }         }     }