How do I dynamically embed a winform subform into the tab control of a main winform?

Question

Is there a way that I can hand a Winforms form object to a main form containing a tab control, and have the main form load this form object into one of the tabs?

An additional wrinkle: the form object will be instantiated from a different thread than the main form.

Mike Dour · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-19T15:31:06.880

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I don't think it will work when the Forms are created on different threads, but you would normally do this by setting the Form's TopLevel property to False and then adding it to the tab page control (or any other parent control).

Edit: You also need to set the Visible property to True because Forms are hidden by default.

Also, I just tried this and it does work for something like a button created from another thread. But when I did it with a Form, I got an InvalidOperationException.

edited May 19 '11 at 15:31

answered May 19 '11 at 15:18

Mike Dour

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Do I add it to the Controls collection of the tab page? – Robert Harvey May 19 '11 at 15:24
Yes, or you can set the Parent property of the Form to the tab page control. – Mike Dour May 19 '11 at 15:31
By the way, the better way to go is to use an MDI interface as SwDevMan81 suggests. The MDI interface handles the layout and management of the child Forms as you would expect. – Mike Dour May 19 '11 at 15:35
Yo, I think I worked on a CSE305 project with you at UB (haha completely off topic). It was the lisp turtle game of tag. – SwDevMan81 May 19 '11 at 15:36

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered May 19 '11 at 15:19

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Do you want something like Multi Document Interface (MDI) tab page browsing?

answered May 19 '11 at 15:19

SwDevMan81

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Possibly. But the design of the main form is already a bit locked in. – Robert Harvey May 19 '11 at 15:22

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 19 '11 at 15:59

You should be able to just call Add from the Controls collection on the TabPage. You will probably want to set the Anchor and Dock properties accordingly so that the control fills the whole surface (assuming that is what you want).

I do not think creating the control from another thread is a good route though. I am sure you are quite capable of making this hand off thread-safe as far as using the appropriate synchronization mechanisms and whatever. But, all UI elements have thread-affinity which means that once that UI element is created it belongs to the creating thread. You may not have any issues with simply creating (just a constructor call), but I take the rule of keeping all UI element logic on the UI thread quite literally and strictly.

You can't just add a Form to another Control. It will throw an exception. You must first set its TopLevel property to False. — Mike Dour, May 19 '11 at 16:14

How do I dynamically embed a winform subform into the tab control of a main winform?

3 Answers3