Cycling through all GUI Objects within a form

[Urs Enzler]

by looping through all children of the MainForm and their children and so on. You can use either recursion or a Stack algorithm. To get the children use the Controls property of a Control. To speed things up use property HasChildren to check if a Control has childrens.

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[Pete OHanlon]

Colin Angus Mackay wrote:

Brilliant minds...

Sometimes our level of genius is quite embarrassing.:-D

Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.

[Urs Enzler]

Do not forget to check the HasChildren property. Speeds things up.

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[karoitay]

As I said I need not cycle over the controls only. For Ex: Assuming ther is a Control Within the Form of Type - ToolStrip The ToolStrip Class has no Controls Property Its Childeren are Beeing held in a collection which can be accessed with the Items Propery - Now - to get to them I cannot do what u have all mentioned above. So... my Question Remains - how can this be done?

[karoitay]

As I said I need not cycle over the controls only. For Ex: Assuming ther is a Control Within the Form of Type - ToolStrip The ToolStrip Class has no Controls Property Its Childeren are Beeing held in a collection which can be accessed with the Items Propery - Now - to get to them I cannot do what u have all mentioned above. So... my Question Remains - how can this be done?

[karthick n mca]

poda....................:laugh:

[Colin Angus Mackay]

Then you will have to use reflection to determine if you need to recurse into a Controls collection or an Items collection.

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[Anthony Mushrow]

Iterate like people have said, but check the type of the object, and run a separate peice of code to get its items collection, or its child controls etc. Whatever you do, im pretty sure there isn't some simple function you can use, its gonna take quite the chunk of code, and your probably gonna have to write it all yourself.

[karoitay]

I Have just recently heard about reflection and I'm quite not familiar with the subject. So... can you please hand me a little piece of code to show how can this be done so I will not have to read all about reflection. ( I'm a litle busy the next days any I need this job to be done as quickly as possible ). Thanks.

[Martin 0]

Don't you think, that this would bring a lot of useless matches (ListBox.Items). I think it would be easier to check out how many control classes don't match "Controls", and do a typecheck ("as") at them!

All the best, Martin

[karthick n mca]

you go to hell.............

[Colin Angus Mackay]

Martin# wrote:

Don't you think, that this would bring a lot of useless matches (ListBox.Items).

Since I don't know what the overall purpose is I can't say if that would bring lots of useless matches or not. It might do. It might not.

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Upcoming FREE developer events: * Glasgow: db4o: An Embeddable Database Engine for Object-Oriented Environments, Mock Objects, SQL Server CLR Integration, Reporting Services ... My website

[Urs Enzler]

I wouldn't use reflection. I'd just test if the current control is of a type with a property Controls or whether it is of for example type ToolStrip: Or the make the code more readable, introduce several overloaded methods that take the different types as a parameter (one overload for control, one for toolstrip, ....) And call them recursively.

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[PIEBALDconsult]

That may depend on how the enumeration is implemented.

[Dave Kreskowiak]

Whould you mind explaining yourself?? Undefeated's explanation and suggestion is perfectly valid.

A guide to posting questions on CodeProject[^]
Dave Kreskowiak Microsoft MVP Visual Developer - Visual Basic
     2006, 2007

[karoitay]

The Overall purpose is to have a dictionary that will map a Gui object to a bitmask to determine its accessibility to each user of the application

[Dan Neely]

but it wasn't something that could be copy/pasted as is to do the OPs homework/job for him. Consequently it was worthless. :mad:

-- If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.

[J4amieC]

karoitay wrote:

I'm a litle busy the next days any I need this job to be done as quickly as possible

Gee, why didn't you say so. I'll get right on it. :rolleyes:

--- How to get answers to your questions[^]

[Colin Angus Mackay]

You can ask every object for its type with .GetType(). You get back a Type object. It has methods on it such as GetMethod, GetProperty and so on. You can get information from the objects those methods return MethodInfo or PropertyInfo and so on. If you find the one you want you can then Invoke it. Most of this should make enough sense through intellisense. You may have to look up some stuff in the documentation though. It really is worth reading up on so you have a better understanding of the environment in which you are working.

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[karoitay]

Thanks, I'll check it out.