Question

I am looking into developing a GUI that will switch the controls based on the value of the selected combo box item.

I have tried adding a different canvas or grid to the gui designer in visual studio but it comes hard to manage as everything overlaps each other in the designer and is hard to know what’s what.

Is there an easy way that I can do this, is there a particular control that makes this easy to achieve. I don’t really want code the gui in c# and not use xaml.

What I was hoping to do is that all the controls are in there own panel and when the combo box value is changed one panel is removed or hidden and the other is shown.

How can something like this be achieved.

Thanks for any help you can provide

Answer 1

You could implement each different “mode” as a separate UserControl.

Then have a shell with the combobox, where the combobox OnChange will swap out what UserControl is plugged into the shell.

Any other totally common components such as OK/cancel buttons could be part of the shell.

A completely alternative implementation to consider is a tabbed approach, but that probably only flies if it makes sense for the user to act on several of them.

What will you do if the user selects A in the combo, makes changes in UserControlForA, and then selects B in the combo? Could be an annoying corner case, and if this is production code the sort of thing that you’ll get future user requests to change how it works.

If you’re sure of the design go for it. If not, I’d play around with a few apps and try to find a nice example of the same sort of thing, and consider how they approached it.

But techwise I think a UserControl is what you’re describing.

(Edit: crud just saw the xaml/wpf in the question, not sure this is correct in that context, clueless there)