Monday, October 24, 2011

Computing the viewport size within a WPF Border control

Copyright © 2011, Steven E. Houchin. All rights reserved.

I have a WPF application that renders a photo bitmap inside a System.Windows.Controls.Image control that is contained within a System.Windows.Controls.Border. If the photo bitmap is too large for the app window (either in the horizontal or vertical direction), I set the Image's corresponding size attribute(s) to 'Auto' (i.e. Double.NaN) within the Image's SizeChanged event handler. If the bitmap is smaller than the app window, I set the Image's size to the actual fixed size of the bitmap, so it doesn't get scaled.

But, that left a problem when I resized the app window smaller: a fixed-size Image was truncated by the border when the window shrank smaller than the photo's bitmap size. And, because the Image's width/height weren't set to Auto, its SizeChanged event wasn't firing.

However, the Border's SizeChanged event was firing. So, I added that handler for the Border control, planning to set the Image's proper width/height after resize.  That left another problem in this new event handler: how to calculate whether or not the Image control's width/height should be Auto or fixed.  Put another way, what was the size of the viewport inside the Border control where the Image would be rendered?

The Border's SizeChanged event handler is passed a SizeChangedEventArgs parameter that provides the new width/height of the Border control. The size available to the Image control inside that will clearly be smaller, but by how much? Here is the algorithm in C# that I came up with (keep in mind that a negative BorderThickness means the border is drawn outside the control's drawing area):

// Calculate the Border control's new viewport
// size within the drawn border where the Image control
// is rendered (add in any padding and non-negative
// border thickness).
Size viewport = new Size();
viewport.Width = e.NewSize.Width -
    (border.Padding.Left + border.Padding.Right) -
    ((border.BorderThickness.Left > 0) ?
        border.BorderThickness.Left : 0) -
    ((border.BorderThickness.Right > 0) ?
        border.BorderThickness.Right : 0);
viewport.Height = e.NewSize.Height -
    (border.Padding.Top + border.Padding.Bottom) -
    ((border.BorderThickness.Top > 0) ?
        border.BorderThickness.Top : 0) -
    ((border.BorderThickness.Bottom > 0) ?
        border.BorderThickness.Bottom : 0);
This viewport variable now holds the size available for the Image control inside the border. Now, all I have to do is determine if the Image needs to be scaled down in the viewport or set to a fixed size. One thing I discovered is that the Image's Margin value must be taken into account, since it is also rendered inside the viewport along with the photo bitmap. The code to determine the right sizing, in this case for the width is:

// Calculate the image's real width to determine if
// scaling is needed
double imageWidth = _bitmapActualSize.Width +
    image.Margin.Left + image.Margin.Right;
if (viewport.Width > imageWidth)
{
    // Restrict the Image control's width to the
    // bitmap's actual width
    image.Width = _bitmapActualSize.Width;
}
else if (viewport.Width < imageWidth)
{
    if (Double.NaN != image.Width)
    {
        // Set the Image control's width to 'Auto' so
        // it will scale down to fit
        image.Width = Double.NaN;
    }
}
The same calculation is done for the Image height immediately after. This results in the proper change to the photo bitmap size just at the right time.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Eliminating Visible Image Borders on Blogger

Copyright © 2011, Steven E. Houchin

Something that has driven me crazy for quite awhile about Blogger is its propensity to place a thick white border around any image I added to my postings. Editing the HTML of the img element to include border="0" or a style="border: none;" or anything else like that was simply ignored. What the heck was happening?

Then, I found a hint on another site, where it referred to Blogger's "template style sheet." After some poking around in Blogger, I stumbled across it. When logged in, navigate to the Dashboard page, then select the Design tab (or link), then click the Edit HTML link along the top. This brings up a screen that allows editing of your blog template, which contains the HTML, CSS, and Javascript that is the basis for every posting. On this template page, it suggests you download your existing template before messing with it, which sounds like good advice. Under the Edit Template heading is the text of the template which you can alter.

Okay. Now to the nuts and bolts of what I did to eliminate the image border. In my template, there was a CSS directive like this:

.post-body img,  .post-body .tr-caption-container { 
   padding: 8px;
}

The 8 pixels of padding is the border I saw, because it seems to inherit a white background color from elsewhere. My images are controlled by the ".post-body img" class. So, I deleted that class specification from the above and created a new one that had the padding and background specifications I wanted:

.post-body .tr-caption-container {
  padding: 8px;
}

.post-body img {
  padding: 8px;
  background: $(post.background.color);
}

This keeps the padding (which I like since it provides some separation between the image and the text) and makes the background color for the image's box the same as the post's color. The $(post.background.color) value is, I think, a variable handled by Blogger's XSL processing that is replaced in the final output with the actual color (or "transparent" in my case).

Once I saved these CSS changes to my template ... voila! The image borders in all my posts (new and old) vanished. In reality, all I really did was change the background color of the padding for just the images.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Finding IWin32Window in WPF

Copyright © 2011, Steven E. Houchin

I'm developing a WPF desktop application (C# and .NET 3.5) that needs to pop up a dialog window allowing the user to browse for a folder.  .NET provides a convenient (and bland) dialog that does this: System.Windows.Forms.FolderBrowserDialog. To pop up this dialog as modal from my app, I must call its ShowDialog method. Since I want it to be a child of my main window, I need to pass it the parent window, which should be straightforward given the "owner" parameter to the method in question:

DialogResult ShowDialog(System.Windows.Forms.IWin32Window owner);

The problem is, the would-be parent window of that dialog is of type System.Window, not IWin32Window, so "this.Owner" won't match the datatype of ShowDialog's "owner" parameter.  So, given that I have a WPF System.Window-derived parent class, where do I obtain an IWin32Window object?

Well, it turns out I have to write a tiny bit of code for it. Specifically, I must implement the IWin32Window interface on the parent window's class:

public partial class Main : Window,
    System.Windows.Forms.IWin32Window
{
...
   #region IWin32Window implementation
   IntPtr System.Windows.Forms.IWin32Window.Handle
   {
      get
      {
         return ((HwndSource)
             PresentationSource.FromVisual(this)).Handle;
      }
   }
   #endregion
...
}

With the IWin32Window.Handle property now implemented in the parent class, I can simply call ShowDialog(this). Note that you must also include a "using System.Windows.Interop" for this to work.