Question

I have a groupbox with a background of a certain color containing a textbox. I was thinking of ways to help the user see that the textbox was dirty, and thought perhaps changing the background groupbox color and/or adding a “*” to the name of the groupbox and/or Form Text would be nice. But I can’t get the event to even change the property of _isDirty. Let alone implement this idea. I’m sure that someone has done something similar and Hope that you could help me. I’m working with C# .Net framework 2.0 (it should also work in 4.0 but that’s backwards compatible I believe). IDE is Visual Studios 10.

The idea is when the textbox is changed, the _isDirty “flag”/”property” will be changed, as well as when it has been saved:

_isDirty = true when textbox has been changed

_isDirty = false when textbox has been saved

This is what I have at the moment.. though I’ve tried different things including the INotify which wasn’t working for me at all…

    public static bool _isDirty = false;

    private void textBox1_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        string newtext = textBox1.Text;
        if (currentText != newtext)
        {
            // This solves the problem of initial text being tagged as changed text
            if (currentText == "")
            {
                _isDirty = false;
            }
            else
            {
                //OnIsDirtyChanged();
                _isDirty = true; //might have to change with the dirty marker
            }
            currentText = newtext;
        }
    }

     public bool IsDirty
    {
        get { return _isDirty; }
        set
        {
            if (_isDirty != value)
            {
                _isDirty = value;
                OnIsDirtyChanged(_isDirty);
            }
        }
    }

    protected void OnIsDirtyChanged(bool _isDirty)
    {
        if (_isDirty == true)
        {
            this.Text += "*";
        }
    }

If someone has a different suggestion to how I go about this, or a nicer user friendly way of doing this, I’m open for suggestions.. Thanks!

EDIT: The answer is actually in 2 parts! The correction to make the property change event WORK was given by BRAM.
If you want to know how to change background color, then look at ZARATHOS’S answer.
Unfortunately I can only mark ONE answer, so going to mark the one that got the main bit working.

Answer 1

You are setting _isDirty so the event does not fire.
You need to set IsDirty.

    if (currentText != newtext)
    {
        // This solves the problem of initial text being tagged as changed text
        if (currentText == "")
        {
            IsDirty = false;
        }
        else
        {
            //OnIsDirtyChanged();
            IsDirty = true; //might have to change with the dirty marker
        }
        currentText = newtext;
    }

And this line is wrong

OnIsDirtyChanged(_isDirty);

Needs to be

OnIsDirtyChanged(IsDirty);

Assuming that is the notification event.