Question

I’ve seen similar questions asked before about this, but not precisely what I’m after.

I have a User Control and would like to build in an expandable bunch of properties for editing the control at design time. Note, NOT a group of properties but a list of properties similar to the Size or Location properties which you can open up to reveal other properties. Is this possible and how would I go about doing it?

Thanks,

Answer 1

You need to “group” your properties into a class and then apply a TypeConverter:

[TypeConverter(typeof(ExpandableObjectConverter))]
public class MyProperties {
  public string Item1 { get; set; }
  public string Item2 { get; set; }
}

Then your UserControl would use that class instead of the individual properties it encompasses:

public partial class UserControl1 {

  public UserControl1() {
    InitializeComponent();
    MyProperties = new MyProperties();
  }

  public MyProperties MyProperties { get; set; }
}

Create your own TypeConverter to handle custom circumstances.