About an hour of time is spent each time I release the Alarm Clock of Justice
simply getting Alt-shortcut keys and Tab Indexes working as expected. For example, you would expect to tab from left to right, bottom to top--not jump from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen.
I wrote the code below to automatically generate the tab indexes so that I don't have to do it by hand--saving much time.
General Idea
- Read in a source file (The code was made for VB.NET but should work in C#)
- Recursively walk through all the controls, and compare their relative location on the form (X and Y/Top and Left)
- After sorting these controls, give all of them TabIndexes
- Sort their children
The code
Here is the code nearly verbatim, with some commented lines removed. It is sloppy, slow, and inefficient. However,
as it's not in the final program, I couldn't care less.
'Notes:
'This code is inefficient, but it gets the job done and I really don't care
'I make everything Public by default. Anything else is pointless
'Things that can make this better but I don't care enough to do them:
'This will run faster if replacement_string is a StringBuilder
'The regular expression thing probably brings the system to its knees
'take out the for each loop--it runs slower than a for i = 0 to X
'make it not recursive
'make stuff not passed byval
Public const source_file as String = "..\MainForm.vb"
Public replacement_string as String
Public last_tab_id As Integer = 0
Private Sub A_button_that_gets_clicked(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button5.Click
replacement_string = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(source_file)
'make backup file
System.IO.File.WriteAllText(source_file + ".bak, tabstr)
traverse_children(Me)
System.IO.File.WriteAllText(source_file, replacement_string)
End Sub
Public Function traverse_children(ByRef mcontrol As Control) As Integer
Dim sorted_control_list As New Generic.List(Of Control)
Dim i As Integer
Dim cnt As Int32 = mcontrol.Controls.Count - 1
For i = 0 To cnt 'Addrange fails?
sorted_control_list.Add(mcontrol.Controls(i))
Next
sorted_control_list.Sort(AddressOf MainForm.Compare)
For Each ncontrol As Control In sorted_control_list
If (ncontrol.Name.Length > 0) Then
ncontrol.TabIndex = last_tab_id
replacement_string = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(tabstr, ncontrol.Name + ".TabIndex = \w+", ncontrol.Name + ".TabIndex = " + last_tab_id.ToString())
last_tab_id += 1
End If
Next
'now traverse these children!
for i = 0 to cnt
traverse_children(ncontrol.controls(i))
next
Return last_tab_id
End Function
Public Shared Function Compare(ByVal c1 As Control, ByVal c2 As Control) As Integer
'the runtime whines if it passes in the same objects and you say they are different'
'and I always say they are different
'always
If (Object.ReferenceEquals(c1, c2)) Then
Return 0
End If
'sort by height
'then sort by x
'+- 10 difference for things that are relatively close together
If (c1.Location.Y > (c2.Location.Y + 10)) Then
Return 1
ElseIf (c1.Location.Y < (c2.Location.Y - 10)) Then
Return -1
Else
If (c1.Location.X > c2.Location.X) Then
Return 1
Else
Return -1
End If
End If
Return 0
End Function
