Get Parents of a Control in winforms

Question

I have Panel1 inside this Panel2 and inside this Panel3 ... So imagine like

Panel1->Panel2->Panel3->button1

So How can get a path string like

string path=\Panel1\Panel2\Panel3\button1

if I want to get all Parents of button1.
And Can I do that using with defining a class which implement IExtenderProvider, so is it possible to make it in design time.

Answer 1

Here is an extension method to get all of the parents' names as an IEnumerable<string>:

public static class Extensions
{
    public static IEnumerable<string> GetControlPath(this Control c)
    {
        yield return c.Name;

        if (c.Parent != null)
        {
            Control parent = c.Parent;

            while (parent != null)
            {
                yield return parent.Name;
                parent = parent.Parent;
            }                
        }
    }
}

And here is a property of a UserControl that I added to the Project that will make use of it:

public partial class CustomControl : UserControl
{
    public CustomControl()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
    }

    public string ControlPath
    {
        get
        {
            return string.Join(@"\", this.GetControlPath().Reverse());
        }
    }
}

After building, drag the user control onto the Form from the toolbox. Be sure to nest it inside other controls pretty good. I nested 3 panels and put it in the innermost panel similar to your example. Here's what the properties look like at Design time:

This should be applicable to any class you make that derives from Control. IExtenderProvider seems irrelevant here.