how to prevent control disappearing when form's width is decreased?

Question

I want to make a resizable menu on the top of my main Windows form. I added a TableLayoutPanel and set its Dock property to Top. There are equal 4 columns on this TableLayoutPanel. I have added a button on every columns and set their Dock property to Fill. When I maximize the form, my menu becomes wider and fits to form's width. That is what I want for now. However, when I decrease(not minimized) the width of form, buttons started to disappear from the left. I expect to autosize itself when form's width decrease. How can I prevent this? Any suggestions?

@HansPassant columns are on their default value which is: autosize — cihadakt, Jan 14 '14 at 07:05

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 15 '14 at 15:45

I was able to reproduce this behavior quite quickly in VS2013 targeting the .Net 4.0 framework. It appears as though the last column is the one affected by the autosizing process. I set the columns to be absolute (20 pixels) and then used a dynamic calculation to determine the percentage of the screen that the column should consume. Any time you add/remove a column, you would need to call the SetColumnSize() method.

 public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();

        SetColumnSize();


    }

    private void SetColumnSize()
    {
        float colPercent = 100 / this.tableLayoutPanel1.ColumnCount;
        this.tableLayoutPanel1.ColumnStyles.Clear();
        for (int i = 0; i < this.tableLayoutPanel1.ColumnCount; i++)
        {
            this.tableLayoutPanel1.ColumnStyles.Add(new System.Windows.Forms.ColumnStyle(System.Windows.Forms.SizeType.Percent, colPercent));
        }
    }

how to prevent control disappearing when form's width is decreased?

1 Answers1