I have a custom control with a public collection marked as DesignerSerializationVisibility.Content
.
When I add items to the collection using the designer, it adds them to the designer file and assigns all desired values but it gives each element of the collection a generic name, such as MyClass1
, MyClass2
, etc. I want the "Name" property of each item to become the code name of the item so that I can then access the item by its name in code.
This is the functionality of how a ContextMenuStrip and ToolStrip works. In those cases, the Name property shows up as (Name)
in the property grid.
Is there an attribute or something I can use to gain this functionality? Or do I have to write a whole custom designer dialog? If so, what's an example of the simplest way I could go about achieving this?
You can try inheriting from Component to get that feature.
In this example, I created a class called PanelItem
, which will be the class used in my collection by my own Panel class. I added DesignTimeVisible(false)
so that it doesn't populate the component tray in the designer.
Also, I added a Name
property that is hidden from the designer but can be used in code. It seemed to work in my tests:
[DesignTimeVisible(false)]
public class PanelItem : Component {
[DefaultValue(typeof(string), "")]
public string PanelText { get; set; }
private string name = string.Empty;
[Browsable(false)]
[DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Visible)]
public string Name {
get {
if (base.Site != null) {
name = base.Site.Name;
}
return name;
}
set {
name = value;
}
}
}
Then my custom panel control:
public class MyPanel : Panel {
private List<PanelItem> panelItems = new List<PanelItem>();
[DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Content)]
public List<PanelItem> PanelItems {
get { return panelItems; }
}
}
Resulted in: