The Panel control is a container control that is used to host a
group of similar child controls. One of the major uses I found for a Panel
control when you have to show and hide a group of controls. Instead of show and
hide individual controls, you can simply hide and show a single Panel and all
child controls.
In this article, we will demonstrate how to create and use a Panel
control in a Windows Forms application.
Creating a Panel
We
can create a Panel control using the Forms designer at design-time or using the
Panel class in code at run-time.
Design-time
To
create a Panel control at design-time, you simply drag and drop a Panel control
from Toolbox to a Form in Visual Studio. After you drag and drop a Panel on a
Form, the Panel looks like Figure 1. Once a Panel is on the Form, you can move
it around and resize it using mouse and set its properties and events.
Figure 1
Run-time
Creating a Panel control at run-time is merely a work of
creating an instance of Panel class, set its properties and adds Panel class to
the Form controls.
First step to create a dynamic Panel is to create an
instance of Panel class. The following code snippet creates a Panel control
object.
Panel dynamicPanel = new Panel();
In the next step, you may set properties of a Panel control.
The following code snippet sets location, size and Name properties of a Panel.
dynamicPanel.Location = new
System.Drawing.Point(26, 12);
dynamicPanel.Name = "Panel1";
dynamicPanel.Size = new
System.Drawing.Size(228, 200);
dynamicPanel.TabIndex = 0;
Once the Panel control
is ready with its properties, the next step is to add the Panel to a Form. To
do so, we use Form.Controls.Add method that adds Panel control to the Form
controls and displays on the Form based on the location and size of the
control. The following code snippet adds a Panel control to the current Form.
Controls.Add(dynamicPanel);
Setting Panel
Properties
After you place a Panel control on a Form, the next step is to set
its properties.
The easiest way to set properties is from the Properties Window.
You can open Properties window by pressing F4 or right click on a control and
select Properties menu item. The Properties window looks like Figure 2.
Figure 2
Panel has most of the common control properties. Here I am going
to discuss the main purpose of a Panel.
Adding
Controls to a Panel
You can add controls to a Panel by dragging and dropping
control to the Panel. We can add controls to a Panel at run-time by using its
Add method. The following code snippet creates a Panel, creates a TextBox and a
CheckBox and adds these two controls to a Panel.
private void
CreateButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Panel dynamicPanel = new Panel();
dynamicPanel.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(26, 12);
dynamicPanel.Name = "Panel1";
dynamicPanel.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(228, 200);
dynamicPanel.BackColor = Color.LightBlue;
TextBox textBox1 = new TextBox();
textBox1.Location = new Point(10, 10);
textBox1.Text = "I am a TextBox5";
textBox1.Size = new Size(200, 30);
CheckBox checkBox1 = new CheckBox();
checkBox1.Location = new Point(10, 50);
checkBox1.Text = "Check Me";
checkBox1.Size = new Size(200, 30);
dynamicPanel.Controls.Add(textBox1);
dynamicPanel.Controls.Add(checkBox1);
Controls.Add(dynamicPanel);
}
The output looks like
Figure 3.
Show and Hide
a Panel
I have seen in many applications when you want to show and
hide a group of controls on a Form based on some condition. That is where a
Panel is useful. Instead of show and hide individual controls, we can group
controls that we want to show and hide and place them on two different Panels
and show and hide the Panels. To show and hide a Panel, we use Visible
property.
dynamicPanel.Visible = false;
Summary
In this article, we discussed discuss how to create a Panel
control in Windows Forms at design-time as well as run-time. After that, we saw
how to use various properties and methods.