Anchor & Dock For Automatic Resizing

[jmcilhinney]

A lot of people ask how to get their controls to resize when they resize their form. The answer is to use the Anchor and/or Dock properties. For complex layouts, you might also need to use a TableLayoutPanel and/or FlowLayoutPanel. Here's a quick demo. Attached are screen shots of a form in the designer at the default 300x300 and then resized to 640x480. Note that the layout of the controls is maintained. The values of the Anchor and Dock properties of each control are listed below.

Label1.Anchor = Top, Left
Label1.Dock = None

TextBox1.Anchor = Top, Left, Right
TextBox1.Dock = None

Button1.Anchor = Top, Right
Button1.Dock = None

Label2.Anchor = Top, Left
Label2.Dock = None

ComboBox1.Anchor = Top, Left, Right
ComboBox1.Dock = None

TableLayoutPanel1.Anchor = Top, Bottom, Left, Right
TableLayoutPanel1.Dock = None

TextBox2.Anchor = Top, Left
TextBox2.Dock = Fill

TextBox3.Anchor = Top, Left
TextBox3.Dock = Fill

TextBox4.Anchor = Top, Left
TextBox4.Dock = Fill

TextBox5.Anchor = Top, Left
TextBox5.Dock = Fill

TextBox6.Anchor = Top, Left
TextBox6.Dock = Fill

TextBox7.Anchor = Top, Left
TextBox7.Dock = Fill

Button2.Anchor = Bottom, Right
Button2.Dock = None

Button3.Anchor = Bottom, Right
Button3.Dock = None

In addition, note that the TableLayoutPanel containing the six multi-line TextBoxes is configured to have two columns, each with a width of 50.00%, and three rows, each with a height of 33.33%

[formlesstree4]

Great tutorial for newbies who are learning about anchoring controls. Good job JMC.

[kayleigh]

Hi john. I stumbled upon this while searching the forums. Would you say it's out side the scope of this thread to ask about anchoring with inside a user control? To make it clearer if i had a mainform that housed a user control. When mainform re-sized it re-sized the user control and controls? The user control does not resize when Mainform does.

Should i make my own thread

[jmcilhinney]

Hi john. I stumbled upon this while searching the forums. Would you say it's out side the scope of this thread to ask about anchoring with inside a user control? To make it clearer if i had a mainform that housed a user control. When mainform re-sized it re-sized the user control and controls? The user control does not resize when Mainform does.

Should i make my own thread

Anchoring & docking is relative to a controls immediate parent. Any child controls in a UserControl will resize based on the UserControl and a UserControl on a form will resize based on the form. A UserControl is just like any other control. If you have set the Anchor and/or Dock properties of a UserControl on your form and it doesn't resize with the form then something is broken in your project or your system because a UserControl is a control and it behaves like any other control.

[IHappenToBe]

Is there anything similar to Anchor/Dock in VB6?

[jmcilhinney]

Is there anything similar to Anchor/Dock in VB6?

The VB6 forum would be the logical place to ask that question. I've never used VB6 and I'm glad of it.