Run-time creation of Visual Studio form designer source code

Question

I'm refactoring a program containing a lot of forms created dynamically from run-time informations.

To reduce the level of complexity of the system, I thought to write individual code files for each of these forms. Since the forms are many, I'm thinking for a way to automate the process of creation of the forms source code files from data collected at run-time.

E.g. if i have a run-time instance of a form called EditPeople, I want to create the source code of EditPeople.designer.cs, so that then I can edit the form in windows form designer.

Do you know if there is some framework or tool that can simplify this task?

Answer 1

I just saw this question, for future reference you could try something like this:

public static List<Control> GetAllControls(IList ctrls)
{
   List<Control> FormCtrls = new List<Control>();
   foreach (Control ctl in ctrls)
   {
      FormCtrls .Add(ctl);
      List<Control> SubCtrls = GetAllControls(ctl.Controls);
      FormCtrls .AddRange(SubCtrls);
   }
   return FormCtrls;
} 

You can use this function like this:

List<Control> ReturnedCtrls = GetAllControls(MyForm.Controls);

The when you have a list of all the controls you can do something like this:

foreach(Control ctrl in ReturnedCtrls)
{
   // Generate Designer Source using ctrl properties
   ctrl.Left
   ctrl.Top
   // etc...
}