Ultimate UI for Windows Forms: What's New in 17.1

Infragistics Team / Monday, June 26, 2017

There are over 100 fully featured Windows Forms UI controls, including high-performance grids, dashboards and reports with touch and gesture support. In this release, we have added even more controls and extended existing controls with features that you have asked for.

Let's look at each new feature and control that was added for the 17.1 release.

Japanese imperial Dates

Many of you asked for the WinMaskedEdit and WinDateTimeEditor controls to support the Japanese Imperial Data Format. We implemented that in this release.

Besides the Gregorian calendar’s date format, the control can also be configured to use the Japanese calendar’s date format in which the year is represented by an Era and the year of the Era.

When the Japanese calendar is used the year is no longer represented in the Western format, but as an Era and the year of this Era. When the control is in edit mode and the cursor is in the Era field the user may select a specific Era using the keyboard shortcuts in the following table:

Era (Japanese)	Reign Start Date	Keyboard shortcut
Meiji ( 明治 )	1868 / Sep / 08	M, m or 1
Taishō ( 大正 )	1912 / Jul / 30	T, t or 2
Shōwa ( 昭和 )	1926 / Dec / 25	S, s or 3
Heisei ( 平成 )	1989 / Jan / 08	H, h or 4

WinRadioButton (New Control)

We have added a new control to the Windows Forms suite of controls: WinRadioButton. This is a selectable button linked to other radio buttons in a group. Its defining characteristic is that only one radio button within a group may be checked at one time, so when a radio button is selected, all others within the group become deselected. This is useful in scenarios where a choice must be made between mutually exclusive options.

Radio buttons automatically group with other radio buttons within the same control container by default, or they can be grouped manually by using a Radio Button Group Manager component, allowing for a custom schema and uniform Appearance settings. Finally, the Win Radio Button can be used within a grid to allow users to make an exclusive selection of a grid row.

WinGeographicMap (New Control)

This control is extremely popular in Ultimate UI for WPF and Ignite UI products, so for this release, we brought the control to Windows Forms. The WinGeographicMap control allows you to display data that contains geographic locations or geospatial data loaded from shape files on geographic imagery maps. The control also allows you to render geographic imagery from Bing Maps™, and Open Street Maps.

The following are preview of the WiGeographicMap control with maps from different geographic imagery sources:

WinGeographicMap with geographic imagery from Open Street Maps

WinGeographicMap with geographic imagery from Bing Maps

WinGeographicMap with multiple geographic series

PeekPopup (New Control)

Originally only available as an extension of the Outlook Navigation Bar, the Peek Pop-up control is now available as a standalone drop-down control to offer a more modern user experience.

Notification Badges

Notification Badges allow you to notify your users about important events that require their attention. This feature, previously exclusive to WinToolbarsManager, now is supported in the following controls:

WinTree
WinTab and WinTabStrip
WinStatusBar
WinListView
WinExplorerBar

MaskedEditors Spanning across Sections

For this release we also added the ability for the developer to set the WinDateTimeEditor, WinCurrencyEditor, WinMaskedEditor and WinNumbericEditor control’s behavior when a numeric section is incremented past its maximum range through the SpinWrapBehavior property.

The options now available are:

Default— By default, the control will follow the WrapAcrossSections behavior.
NoWrapping— The value will stop incrementing/decrementing at the max/min.
WrapAcrossSections— The value will go to the min/max and increment/decrement the next high section. For example, if a month set at 12 is incremented, the month will go to 1 and the year will be incremented by 1.
WrapCurrentSection— The value will go to the min/max and no other sections will be affected. For example, if a month set at 12 is incremented, the month will go to 1 and the year will remain the same.

WinGrid ColPosChanged Event Args Enhancements

We’ve improved the four ColPosChanged events to better accommodate column fixing. This improvement applies to the following events:

Previously, the PosChanged argument described the type of position change that occurred, but there was not an enum to denote that column positions were changed due to a fixing action. Instead, the PosChanged value would be Moved, causing ambiguity between fixing and moving actions.

ColumnPosChangedType is the new argument replacing PosChanged. It includes a FixedStateChanged flagged enum option to distinguish between fixing and moving actions.

Note that PosChanged has been obsoleted, not removed, so that existing apps depending on this argument can continue working as designed. As such, this is not a breaking change.

WinGrid Editable Column Headers

Enabling the Editable Headers feature allows users to modify column, group, and band caption of the headers on the WinGrid. When enabled, users can edit a header by double clicking it or by taking any other action specified by the developer.

If you have ideas about new features and controls that you would like to see in this product, please let us know by posting them on our Product Ideas websites. Try Ultimate UI for Windows Forms today for free by downloading the trial version now. And be sure to follow and engage with us on Twitter via @infragistics. Also make sure to connect with our various teams via our Community Forums where you can interact with Infragistics engineers and other customers.