How do you handle complex UI?

[michael_hk]

Hi guys,

 

Say you need to develop a complex winform which contains many buttons, textboxes, labels, datagrids etc. When the user clicks on button A, you need to enable/disable, set the visibility of some other controls. For button B, you do similar stuff.

 

 

private void btn_A_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
ControlA.enable = true;
ControlB.enable = false;
...
}

I find this style of programming is error-prone, ie very easily you will forget to handle some of the controls. Worst still, if you later need to add an extra control, you need to insert

 

 

private void btn_A_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
ControlA.enable = true;
ControlB.enable = false;
...
NewControl.enable = true; // handle the new control
}

everywhere in the (eg. Click, Changed) events.

 

My question is how you guys handle this problem?

 

Any idea/comment is appreciated.

 

Cheers, :)

Michael

[mskeel]

One way I've handled this is by making a single method that handles all the enabling and disabling.

 

For example, you would make a method called something like SetButtons(bool enabled) and toggle everything by calling that method with the paramater of either true or false.

[Tygur]

Well, if you need to enable/disable/whatever all the controls on a certain Panel or something, you can just loop through all its controls:

Dim Ctrl As Control
For Each Ctrl In MyPanel.Controls
   Ctrl.Enabled = False
Next

 

Otherwise, you can add similar controls to an Array or ArrayList or something, and then just loop through that.