[IronPython] WPF / ipy minimize weirdness?

[Ken MacDonald]

Hi Jimmy,
Thanks for the note!

I was thinking more about this last night - the app is a legacy thing I've
taken over, where the modal selection dialog is quite a heavy-weight entity
- it captures about the same amount of real estate as the underlying
application itself, with a dozen or more controls on it, and the user may be
fooling around with it for 4 or 5 minutes at a stretch. We've concluded that
it should really just present as a separate page on the app, rather than as
a modal dialog, and probably next release we'll be moving toward that; it
solves a stack of other interesting problems as well.

For the time being, we are trying to get to a point where someone may have
not finished messing with the selection dialog, and wants to just minimize
the whole thing (selection and main app window) in order to move to another
app. The 'other app' may be another copy of this one, just running on a
different data store, thus the need to get rid of (minimize completely) the
1st copy to avoid confusion! Obviously, when we move to a single window
design this problem goes away; right now just trying to get the two windows
in the app (if the selection dialog is active) to act "in unison".

In answer to your question, without any event handlers in place, I can
minimize the selection dialog using the standard Windows "_" control, which
leaves the main app window in view, but totally disabled - minimize, exit,
etc. are disabled along with any of the app's controls. Taskbar still had
two icons, one for the dialog and one for the main app, and I could restore
the dialog and continue.

When I added in an event handler, both the selection and main app windows
disappeared, with the modal dialog apparently completely gone (no taskbar
icon any more) and the underlying app still waiting for it, so it's taksbar
icon was completely disabled, unable to restore, cancel, anything.

Hope to get this to work in some fashion, but as I said, I'm going to be
turning this into a separate page for a single app at some point so I may
find some interim not-quite-what-they-want solution if this turns out to be
too much effort to get going.
Ken

On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 3:56 AM, Jimmy Schementi <
Jimmy.Schementi at microsoft.com> wrote:

> Can you manually minimize the modal dialog and then minimize the main
> window at all? The definition of a modal window is that you must interact
> with it first before returning to the main application, so I wouldn’t think
> that you could minimize both, and then somehow ever get back to the parent
> window.
>
>
>
> Also, you should try reproducing this with C# or VB; this sounds like it
> has nothing to do with IronPython, just an issue with using the API.
>
>
>
> *From:* users-bounces at lists.ironpython.com [mailto:
> users-bounces at lists.ironpython.com] *On Behalf Of *Ken MacDonald
> *Sent:* Monday, April 05, 2010 12:26 PM
> *To:* Discussion of IronPython
> *Subject:* [IronPython] WPF / ipy minimize weirdness?
>
>
>
> Hi,
> I have a WPF app and I'm trying to mess with WindowState. I have two
> windows, a modal selection dialog, and a main window. If I bring up the
> selection dialog with the main window in background, and minimize the
> selection dialog, it leaves the main window visible but you can't interact
> with it. So far, normal.
>
> If I make a selection, the select dialog closes leaving the main window,
> and I can minimize the main window using the standard windows controls, and
> restore it from the taskbar. OK so far.
>
> However, I want to get it working like this: if I minimize the selection
> dialog, I'd like to minimize the main window also. So, I added an event
> listener on StateChanged, something like:
>
> def state_changed(...):
>     if self._w.WindowState == WindowState.Minimized:
>         main_window.WindowState = WindowState.Minimized
>
> This captures the minimize event, both the selection dialog and main window
> minimize, BUT now I can't right-or-left-click on the minimized app to get it
> to restore, and have to kill the app using task manager. Also, it appears
> that instead of having two windows represented on the taskbar, only the main
> window is left - even though I should still have both the select dialog and
> the main window minimized.
>
> Is there some magic state I need to set in the main window to be able to
> have it restore again? Why should it make a difference whether the minimize
> is done by the main window 'min' button, or by setting its WindowState?
> Ken
>
> _______________________________________________
> Users mailing list
> Users at lists.ironpython.com
> http://lists.ironpython.com/listinfo.cgi/users-ironpython.com
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/ironpython-users/attachments/20100406/68a9d44f/attachment.html>