Display Dialog in MDI Container

Rousseau Sennett

Hi

Most of my applications is mdi container based and I have been stuck on this one for a while. I would like to display my dialogs in the mdi container.

I'm using c#

ex. Form f = new Form();
f.mdiParrent = this;
f.ShowDialog();

will through an exception. I first thought was to just disable all the mdiParrent's children but that won't work because I want all processing to stop and w8
for the response from the user before continuing because my processing will depend on the users response in the dialog (Like classic dialog).

Any help will be appriciated.

Thx
Rousseau

3 Replies

Know the answer? Post it — somebody with the same question will find it here.

Vulpes15y ago
I thought about passing 'this' to ShowDialog which makes the dialog owned by the MDI parent form. However, the dialog is unlikely to be shown within its owner's bounds - hence my FormStartPosition.CenterParent suggestion.
0
Sam Hobbs15y ago
Note that for classic dialogs, there is a separate message loop inside of Windows. So if you do something such as in my DlgHello then you don't have a message loop in your code. I don't know what is done in .Net for a dialog; I believe that for MFC Microsoft has code to simulate a dialog but it does not use the same code that a "classic dialog" would use. So it is likely that .Net has a version of that, but the important thing is that there is likely a separate message loop (separate from the one for the MDI parent and children). So it makes sense that setting the mdiParrent is incompatible with use of ShowDialog.

Have you tried "f.ShowDialog(this);"?
0
Vulpes15y ago
To the best of my knowledge, there's no way to make an MDI child modal.

What I'd suggest instead is that you make your child form non-MDI but set its FormStartPosition property to CenterParent:

Form f = new Form();
f.StartPosition = FormStartPosition.CenterParent;
f.ShowDialog();

However, this won't prevent someone from subsequently moving the dialog outside the bounds of the parent form unless you write code to make it immovable.
0