Question

In my current application I have a main form: frmMain with a statusstrip and a label: lblStatus inside that.
I would like to update that label from inside my user controls, which I add to my main form when I click the concerning button:

ucBeheer ucBeheer = new ucBeheer();
splitContainer1.Panel2.Controls.Add(ucBeheer);

From inside my usercontrol when I do an action, I would like to update lblStatus. I have tried adding the following property to my main form:

    public string updateStatus
    {
        get { return lblStatus.Text; }
        set { lblStatus.Text = value; }
    }

And then accessing the method like this in my user control:

        frmMain mainForm = new frmMain();
        mainForm.updateStatus = "This is a test";

But that doesn’t work, I know that this is because I am making a new object of my frmMain, but I don’t know how to solve this otherwise?

I have also found the following way, with an Event Handler but I can’t do that because my user control isn’t actually in my mainForm yet, until I add it there with clicking on the button, so I don’t have a reference to it.

So I’m kinda out of ideas, I hope somebody can help me.
Thanks,
Thomas

Edit: So I managed to do it the following way:

        frmMain owningForm = (frmMain)this.Parent.Parent.Parent.Parent;
        owningForm.updateStatus = "This is a test";

but this.Parent.Parent.Parent.Parent... doesn’t really seem like good coding to me, is there any other way to get the most top parent?

Answer 1

You could add a property like this to your usercontrol, with this you can access the frmMain that the usercontrol resides in.

public frmMain MainForm
{
    get
    {
        var parent = Parent;
        while (parent != null && (parent as frmMain) == null)
        {
            parent = parent.Parent;
        }
        return parent as frmMain;
    }
} 

UPDATE:
If you just want the top most parent you could use something like this:

public Control TopMostParent
{
    get
    {
        var parent = Parent;
        while (parent.Parent != null)
        {
            parent = parent.Parent;
        }
        return parent;
    }
} 

Or even make an extension method of that:

public static Control TopMostParent(this Control control)
{
    var parent = control.Parent;
    while (parent.Parent != null)
    {
        parent = parent.Parent;
    }
    return parent;
}