Question

I have a custom control inherited from RichTextBox.
This control has the ability to “disable” rich text editing.
I achive this by just setting the Rtf property to the text property during the TextChanged event.

this is how my code looks like:

        private bool lockTextChanged;
        void RichTextBox_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            // prevent StackOverflowException
            if (lockTextChanged) return;

            // remember current position
            int rtbstart = rtb.SelectionStart;
            int len = rtb.SelectionLength;


            // prevent painting                
            rtb.SuspendLayout();

            // set the text property to remove the entire formatting.
            lockTextChanged = true;
            rtb.Text = rtb.Text;
            rtb.Select(rtbstart, len);
            lockTextChanged = false;

            rtb.ResumeLayout(true);
      }

That worked well. However in a large text with like 200 lines the controls jitters (you see the first lines of text for the wink).

To prevent that from happening I filter the WM_PAINT between SuspendLayout() and ResumeLayout()

    private bool layoutSuspended;
    public new void SuspendLayout()
    {
        layoutSuspended = true;
        base.SuspendLayout();
    }

    public new void ResumeLayout()
    {
        layoutSuspended = false;
        base.ResumeLayout();
    }

    public new void ResumeLayout(bool performLayout)
    {
        layoutSuspended = false;
        base.ResumeLayout(performLayout);
    }

    private const int WM_PAINT = 0x000F;
    protected override void WndProc(ref System.Windows.Forms.Message m)
    {
        if (!(m.Msg == WM_PAINT && layoutSuspended))
            base.WndProc(ref m);

    }

that did the trick, the RichTextBox isn’t jittering anymoe.
That’s what I wanted to achive, except one thing:
The scrollbar is still jittering everytime I type text to my control.

Now my question:
Does anyone have a clue for me how to prevent the scrollbar from redrawing during Suspend/Resume Layout?

Answer 1

SuspendLayout() isn’t going to have an effect, there are no child controls inside an RTB that need to be arranged. RTB is missing the Begin/EndUpdate() methods that most controls have, although it supports it. It suspends painting, although I’m not so sure it suspends updates to the scrollbar. Add them as follows:

public void BeginUpdate() {
  SendMessage(this.Handle, WM_SETREDRAW, (IntPtr)0, IntPtr.Zero);
}
public void EndUpdate() {
  SendMessage(this.Handle, WM_SETREDRAW, (IntPtr)1, IntPtr.Zero); 
}

// P/invoke declarations
private const int WM_SETREDRAW = 0xb;
[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("user32.dll")]
private extern static IntPtr SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd, int msg, IntPtr wp, IntPtr lp); 

The better way to prevent the user from editing text is to set the ReadOnly property to True. Removing the scrollbar entirely is possible too by overriding CreateParams.