Quick example guide ContinuousControl

* Create or open a visual studio windows forms project.
* Add the ContinuousControl class or reference a project containing it.
* Add a new form and open its design window (or open an existing form)
* Drag the ContinuousControl from the toolbox
Those are the default steps to add any control and a newly added ContinuousControl doesn't show anything interesting.


The base format of the control is as empty as possible by design to prevent any use of resources that are turned off later on anyway.

Now let's add a control to it, drag a textbox on the control.

At this picture the ContinuousControl  has been enlarged a bit to better fit the textbox, but further only the textbox was dropped on it.
The control calculates the new item size and shows the position where the other records would be shown with the current settings (the item size can also be set to a fixed size if wanted)
Always start from the left corner. You can use Item properties if you want to alter the padding around the item, but suppose the textbox was dragged to the middle of the control, you'd get something like:

Now we could just keep it at this textbox, but for the example, let's add some more controls. Every time you add or move a control, you'll see that the itemsize is recalculated

If you've been trying out the control yourself, you may have noticed that if you click on the control itself, the "Select Owner" tag appears at the upper right side. This happens because a special designer is added in design time on which the other controls can be dropped. However this does not contain the properties of the main control. To indicate you're not dealing with the actual control, all properties except a reference to its owner have been removed and the mentioned tag is added. Clicking on this tag will select the main control.

If we should run the form at this time, we would still see an empty control. The control was meant to represent data and no datasource is set. To set a datasource the control exposes a BindingSource property where any System.Windows.Forms.BindingSource can be set.
The .net BindingSource on its turn can take practically any source itself, so binding on itself should not pose any problems.
For this test, first drag a bindingsource and then a dataset to the form. Both can be found under the data tab on the toolbox.
For the dataset choose "untyped dataset" when asked which type you want to add.
The bindingsource's property can be set to the added dataset. The dataset itself can be altered to represent the testdata.
After the dataset has been formatted, the controls (any control on the form) can be bound to it. For example, create a table with a boolean column and a string column and bind the checkbox and the textbox to the proper columns.

Since this is not a tutorial on databinding, the below would be the result you'd get in the designer file: InitializeComponentCode

The ShowNavigator property has also been set to true, so we can easily add records in runtime.
Now when this form is shown in runtime, you can press the plus sign to add empty new records (The adding of data itself is all handled by the default .net BindingSource. The used navigator is a normal System.Windows.Forms.BindingNavigator)
After some editing of the values, you could get something like:


Now to emphasize that the used controls are normal form instances (although of course you could also add preformatted custom controls), double click on the button in design mode to create the default click event handler code.
In that handler, write some code that displays the content of the textbox. In runtime you'll see that the data is properly updated and that you can use the controls as if they represent the detail information only.

Finally there are some other options that can be turned on (and more to follow in future versions). An example of the options are represented in the following screenshot: