I have a C# WinForm program that is essentially a glorified text parser. It takes a line of hexidecimal and converts it to human readable information based on the specs that were presented to me. I have a tabcontrol with several tab pages used to display the information. Several of these tabpages are identical but need to be on different tabs based on the line of text parsed out, if the line is of type ‘A’ it displays the information on tab ‘A’, if it is of type ‘B’, it shows on tab ‘B’ and so on.
The problem I am starting to notice with this, is I have quite a bit of textboxes and other controls spanned over all of these tab pages and I believe it is effecting performance a little. I beleive I have in the range of 150+ textboxes now, about the same checkboxes and the like.
The question I have is, is there a way to reuse one page of controls over multiple tab pages and have them display different information based on the tab, so perhaps I can cut down my 100’s of controls and simplify the program itself?
Read down to the added section for a bit more clarity, as I rambled a bit.
There are a couple of ways to solve this architecturally. the basic concept is stop thinking about “tab pages” as a physical concept and start thinking about it logically. As a logical concept, in your implementation, a tab page is a set of controls, some of which are unique and some of which are common (or common to more than one tab).
In a purely dynamic system, you fill in the “controls” and dynamically paint depending on which “tab” the person clicks. This means you do not really need to use a tab control. Instead you paint the “tab page” based on what information should display to the user.
Another option is to leave the unique “controls” already laid out on a “tab page” and leave containers you can add in the non-unique controls to. This takes a bit of planning to determine what controls need to display on what page and how the layout of static (controls placed on a tab) and dynamic intertwine. In other words, a bit of planning can save you a lot of grief.
Either way, you want to fill a single control once, no matter how many “tab pages” it is used on.
Added: Since this is winforms, you have to change your thought paradigm a bit. If you were a webforms developer, you would already think in terms of containers.
One option is a strategy pattern for tabs. the strategy contains the controls needed to paint the “tab page” and their location and size on the page. When a person clicks a tab, you reach into the “bucket o controls” and dynamically add based on the “tab” (strategy) used. You can even pass in the tab page to the strategy and have it dynamically painted there.
the main point in the entire answer is do the work once and then display as needed.