make a form visible in a certain place

Question

I am trying to make a showdialog() mdi child form to be visible in a specific place inside its parent form. Is there any way to achieve this? Thanks in Advanced

Vulpes · Answer

Despite what it says (or doesn't say) in the MSDN docs I'm sure that Sam's suspicions are correct - a child form's Location property is relative to its parent form.

Sam Hobbs · Answer

When you say same location please qualify it. Do you mean same location relative to the desktop or do you mean relative to the parent form? If you need to show the form in the same location relative to the desktop but as a child of another form then you could convert the desktop's position to a position in the parent form's client area. I am not sure what would happen if the coordinates were to be outside of the parent form; I assume you would get negative values that would cause a portion of the form to not show. Okay I did a bit of looking. Apparently a Form's Location Property is always in Screen coordinates. I will be surprised if that applies to child forms too but the documentation does not say that. Also look at the PointToClient and the PointToScreen methods.

George Paroglou · Answer

cheers vulpes for your answer

Vulpes · Answer

Do you mean that you want to display form2 in the same absolute position on the desktop whether form1's maximized or not? This will be impossible unless the starting position of form1 (when normal) is manually controlled because otherwise we won't know where Windows is going to put it. The code I posted earlier will place form2 in the same relative position within form1 even if it's maximized but not of course in the same absolute position.

George Paroglou · Answer

I mean if I can place the form in the same location either when the parent window is in normal size or it maximized.

Vulpes · Answer

Sorry George I don't understand the question. A maximized form is always going to cover the entire desktop apart from the TaskBar. Are you saying that you want a normal form to do the same thing or do you want it to be placed (with its normal size) in the top left hand corner of the desktop? The code to do the latter would be: form2.StartPosition = FormStartPosition.Manual; form2.Location - new Point(0 0); // place in top left hand corner of desktop However for this to work there would have to be no parent/child relationship between form1 and form2. In effect the desktop would become form2's parent.

George Paroglou · Answer

thanks vulpes for the info. There isn't any way to specify the location point of a maximized form to be the same in the case of a normal window form?

Vulpes · Answer

You can do: child.StartPosition = FormStartPosition.Manual; child.Location - new Point(0 0); // place in top left hand corner of parent // or child.Location - new Point(100 100); // place the left hand corner of child at co-ordinates (100100) of parent

George Paroglou · Answer

how i can assign the specific location of the manual way?

Vulpes · Answer

Well I don't think you can show an MDI child form modally because by definition it's not a top level form. So you'd need to remove the parent/child relationship before you could call ShowDialog(). However that apart if you set the child's StartPosition property to FormStartPosition.Manual you should then be able to set its Location property to place it where you want within the parent. You can also use FormStartPosition.CenterParent to place it in the center of the parent.

Suthish Nair · Answer

need a better explanation with details.