Disabling Form Objects

[dm1608]

I have to issues:

1) Does anyone know of a programmatic way I can disable all textboxes,
combo, listboxes, and buttons on a form?

2) What is the best practice for disabling multiple controls on a form.
Basically, I need to disable almost everything on a form and re-enable when
a particular task is complete. It seems like I duplicate the code over and
over in the code... then later when I add a new control, I invariably miss
something.....

 

[Bruce Wood]

Two possibilities:

1. Write code that goes through all of the controls on a form
(recursively walking through the Control list, disabling controls).
This has the advantage that you can pass in controls that you don't
want disabled, and selectively avoid them:

public static void DisableAllControlsExcept(Form myForm, params
Control[] exceptions) ...

2. I've noticed that if you disable a container, such as a Panel, it
disables all controls inside the container, although I don't have time
to try it out right now. The only downside is that you can't make any
exceptions.

 

[Bruce Wood]

By the way, you could write that static method like this (untested code
follows):

public static ArrayList DisableAllControls(ContainerControl container,
params Control[] exceptions)
{
ArrayList disabledControls = new ArrayList();
foreach (Control c in container)
{
ContainerControl childContainer = c as ContainerControl;
if (childContainer != null)
{

disabledControls.AddRange(DisableAllControls(childContainer,
exceptions));
}
else if (Array.IndexOf(exceptions, c) < 0 && c.Enabled)
{
c.Enabled = false;
disabledControls.Add(c);
}
}
return disabledControls;
}

then when you want to enable them again, you can just do:

foreach (Control c in disabledControls)
{
c.Enabled = true;
}

and any that were disabled before the original call to
DisableAllControls are left disabled.