What's New in TX Text Control .NET for WPF 16.0

TX Text Control .NET for WPF begins with version 16.0, which added four WPF controls to the class library of TX Text Control. The same version opened the text of a document to a common interface, so that the main text, text frames and headers and footers became text parts with the same members, and it added a spell checker interface, table headers that repeat on every page and nested merge blocks.

Version 16.0 was released in November 2010, as the blog article TX Text Control 16.0 Has Just Been Released announced. It was the first version with a WPF edition, TX Text Control .NET for WPF, whose installer in the download package is TX Text Control.NET for WPF 16.0.exe; together with the server components, it was also sold as TX Text Control Server for ASP.NET (incl. WPF). Windows Forms features of the version, such as Windows Forms controls in browser applications, aren't listed here; their breaking changes are, because they affect the shared assemblies.

Version 16.0 at a Glance

WPF Controls

The new TXTextControl.WPF namespace holds four controls for WPF applications (.exe) and WPF browser applications (.xbap). They offer the feature set of the Windows Forms controls:

• Text. WPF.TextControl is the word processing control. WPF.TextControlColors sets its display colors.
• Button bar. WPF.ButtonBar is a toolbar that shows and sets font and paragraph attributes.
• Ruler bar. WPF.RulerBar shows and sets the indents, margins and tabs of the TextControl, with colors set through WPF.RulerBar.Colors.
• Status bar. WPF.StatusBar shows the input position and other status information, with colors set through WPF.StatusBarColors.

WPF.TextControl and Ribbon Tabs, Toolbars, Rulers, and Status Bar describe these controls today.

Ribbons and Data Binding

• Input format. The InputFormat class has a property for each character and paragraph attribute at the input position, which is updated whenever the input position changes. WPF.TextControl.InputFormat returns it, so that the controls of a ribbon can bind to it in XAML without code behind.
• Value converters. Four converters adapt values for bindings: WPF.BooleanConverter converts a value to a Boolean, WPF.ColorConverter converts System.Drawing.Color to System.Windows.Media.Color, WPF.MeasureConverter converts twips to another unit, and WPF.LogarithmicConverter maps a value from a linear to a logarithmic scale.

Data Binding shows how bindings to the TextControl work in the current version.

Text Parts

A document consists of its main text and further pieces of text: text frames and headers and footers.

• All text parts. WPF.TextControl.TextParts and ServerTextControl.TextParts return a TextPartCollection with all text parts of the document in geometric order: first the main text, then the text frames, then the headers and footers. Activate moves the input position into a text part, and GetItem returns the active one.
• One interface. Every text part implements IFormattedText, which provides its lines, paragraphs, characters, selection, tables, images, text fields, hypertext links, application fields and misspelled words, and a Find method. WPF.TextControl, ServerTextControl, TextFrame, HeaderFooter and MainText implement it.
• Main text. A MainText object stands for the main text. Its collections always belong to the main text, while the collections of the control belong to the text part that has the input focus.

Subtext Parts covers text parts and subtext parts in the current version.

Spell Checking

TX Text Control got an interface that connects any spell checker:

• The event. Each time the text changes, the SpellCheckText event of the TextControl passes the text to check in its SpellCheckTextEventArgs. The handler returns the positions of all misspelled words as an array of MisspelledWord objects in MisspelledWords. The words are underlined with a red zigzag line.
• Activation. Spell checking works only when IsSpellCheckingEnabled is true. TextField.IsSpellCheckingEnabled excludes a text field.
• The misspelled words. WPF.TextControl.MisspelledWords returns a MisspelledWordCollection; headers, footers and text frames have the same property, and so has ServerTextControl, which received the same event and properties.

Spell Checking and Hyphenation covers spell checking in the current version.

Tables, Formatting and Pages

• Table headers. One or more rows marked with TableRow.IsHeader form the header of a table, which is repeated at the top of each page, or of each column, the table extends over. The table attributes dialog box lets users define it. See Tables and Calculations.
• Indents and font sizes. Selection.IncreaseIndent, DecreaseIndent, GrowFont and ShrinkFont change the indents or the font size of the selection by one step.
• Page size. A PageSize object with Width and Height describes the page size, and PageUnit sets the unit of page sizes and page margins.

Mail Merge

• Nested merge blocks. MailMerge merges nested merge blocks: it descends through the blocks and merges each with the related data. See Nested Blocks and Master-Detail Reports.
• Images. Merge fields whose name starts with image: are filled with images, for example to always merge the current company logo. The ImageFieldMerged event gives access to the merged image as an Image object through ImageFieldMergedEventArgs.
• Merged data. DataRowMergedEventArgs.MergedRow and FieldMergedEventArgs.MergedField return the merged data in the internal TX Text Control Unicode format, and a handler can change it.
• Template information. GetBlockNames lists the names of all merge blocks of the loaded template.
• Whitespace. RemoveTrailingWhitespace removes trailing whitespace before the document is saved. Its default value is true.

Upgrade to Version 16.0

Version 16.0 changed types and assemblies of the class library that TX Text Control .NET for WPF shares with the Windows Forms edition. Code written for earlier versions has to be adapted:

• Page margins. The properties Left, Top, Right and Bottom of PageMargins are of the type double instead of int.
• Page size. ServerTextControl.PageSize, and PageSize of the Windows Forms TextControl, are of the type PageSize instead of System.Drawing.Size.
• Dialog results. The overloads of Selection.Load that open a dialog box return a Selection.DialogResult value instead of System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult.
• Browser controls removed. The classes BrowserTextControl, BrowserButtonBar, BrowserRulerBar and BrowserStatusBar were removed. Replace them with TextControl, ButtonBar, RulerBar and StatusBar.
• Assemblies. TXTextControl.dll was split into TXTextControl.dll and TXTextControl.Windows.Forms.dll.

New Classes, Properties, Methods and Events

The classes and members below are the ones that the What's New documentation of version 16.0 lists for TX Text Control .NET for WPF. Names are relative to the TXTextControl namespace, each name links to its current reference page, and "(obsolete)" marks a member that is obsolete today.

New Classes

• DocumentServer.MailMerge.ImageFieldMergedEventArgs
• InputFormat
• MainText
• MisspelledWord
• MisspelledWordCollection
• PageSize
• SpellCheckTextEventArgs
• TextPartCollection
• WPF.BooleanConverter
• WPF.ColorConverter
• WPF.LogarithmicConverter
• WPF.MeasureConverter
• WPF.RulerBar
• WPF.RulerBar.Colors
• WPF.StatusBar
• WPF.StatusBarColors
• WPF.TextControl
• WPF.TextControlColors

Members by Class

Next Steps

• Version 17.0: the features of the next version.
• Version 15.1: the frame base class and document-wide image export, before the WPF edition.
• Data Binding: bind WPF elements to the TextControl.