Winforms: creating a dynamic timeline control

Question

I need to create a winforms control what looks something like this:

Currently i'm considering taking a picturebox/panel and overriding onpaint event and drawing all the stuff myself. But somehow this approach doesn't seem right.

I was wondering maybe there's an easier way out or perhaps a better solution? How would you make a control like this?

Answer 1

No, that is the right way to do it. Trying to use something like a TableLayoutPanel is not only excruciatingly painful, it also sucks serious mud taking a second or more to paint itself. It will take a bunch of code, but it isn't hard code. Plenty of for loop opportunities as well.

Get the scrolling view with panel's AutoScrollMinSize. Use Graphics.TranslateTransform() passing AutoScrollPosition in the Paint event or OnPaint override. The latter is recommended, derive your own control from Panel to keep the code separate. You have lots of flexibility here to customize the appearance, have fun.

Answer 2

The last time I did something like this I did the grid as a bitmap, loaded the image into a picture box, and drew directly on the image. The problem with using the paint event it's not persistent with minimizing etc unless you keep redrawing it.

Answer 3

它可能更容易覆盖文字控件或从CompositeControl类继承，然后使用HTML（表格）和Javascript渲染它而不是绘制它。