How to get controls in WPF to fill available space?

wpf user-interface layout
Rune Jacobsen picture Rune Jacobsen · Aug 30, 2008 · Viewed 274.2k times · Source

Some WPF controls (like the Button) seem to happily consume all the available space in its' container if you don't specify the height it is to have.

And some, like the ones I need to use right now, the (multiline) TextBox and the ListBox seem more worried about just taking the space necessary to fit their contents, and no more.

If you put these guys in a cell in a UniformGrid, they will expand to fit the available space. However, UniformGrid instances are not right for all situations. What if you have a grid with some rows set to a * height to divide the height between itself and other * rows? What if you have a StackPanel and you have a Label, a List and a Button, how can you get the list to take up all the space not eaten by the label and the button?

I would think this would really be a basic layout requirement, but I can't figure out how to get them to fill the space that they could (putting them in a DockPanel and setting it to fill also doesn't work, it seems, since the DockPanel only takes up the space needed by its' subcontrols).

A resizable GUI would be quite horrible if you had to play with Height, Width, MinHeight, MinWidth etc.

Can you bind your Height and Width properties to the grid cell you occupy? Or is there another way to do this?

Answer

Matt Hamilton picture Matt Hamilton · Aug 31, 2008

There are also some properties you can set to force a control to fill its available space when it would otherwise not do so. For example, you can say:

HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch"

... to force the contents of a control to stretch horizontally. Or you can say:

HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"

... to force the control itself to stretch horizontally to fill its parent.

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