I’m introducing a new type of post here, one that my family doesn’t care about, but others around the interwebs might find useful.
I was working on a side project at work recently and had some trouble getting the layout to behave the way I wanted it and after much surfing to try and find a resolution I was unable to find any specific information about this issue.
Grouping common radio buttons between group boxes:
When you are using the designer in Visual Studio to layout your form if you want to group radio buttons together you need to use either a Panel or a GroupBox to link those radio buttons together (make them mutually exclusive). By default any radio buttons located within a GroupBox will be part of the same radio button group (see Figure 1). What if you wanted to group the radio buttons together logically, but not programmatically? Is there a way to get all the radio buttons to act as one continuous group, but have it look like Group A relates to one thing and Group B relates to another?
[Figure 1] Radio buttons are part of separate groups and each can have a value selected.
Create a Panel around the outside of both GroupBox controls (see Figure 2).
[Figure 2] Create a Panel control that surrounds both GroupBox controls.
Drag the Radio buttons onto the Panel control. Right-click on the GroupBox controls and choose “Send to Back” so they show up below the radio buttons. (see Figure 3).
[Figure 3] Radio buttons are located on the Panel layer, not within the GroupBox controls.
Once you have the radio buttons within the Panel control you need to use the keyboard to position them where you want them “within” the GroupBox controls. If you use the mouse to reposition the Radio buttons then they will automatically be placed within the GroupBox controls and will be grouped separately. Performing this step with the keyboard you can now have only 1 Radio button selected at a time, but you can logically group common radio buttons together with the nice labels that GroupBox controls provide (see Figure 4). If you try and add a GroupBox control to a group of Radio buttons it automatically adds them to the GroupBox control. Very annoying.
[Figure 4] Only one radio button can be selected at a time, regardless what GroupBox control they live in.
Hope this helps.
~Matt
