Hi Sam,

Before I move on to answering your questions, I would like to entreat you to start new topics in the forum when you have questions that are unrelated to an existing topic (such is the current case), rather than dumping everything into one big topic. This way the forum is kept more organized and can be helpful to others too. Thank you.

Regarding your questions:

To make appointments fully or partially transparent try assigning a brush with the appropriate alpha channel as a background. Overall transparency can be achieved through custom drawing. You can have a look at the AdvancedItemDrawing sample, which illustrates how to do this in more details. To fill an item in two colors you can use custom drawing as well. However, this can probably be achieved by using a linear gradient brush with very sharp transition from one of the colors to the other. By using this approach however, you may experience some artifacts in GDI+.

Quote:


If you are trying to draw dependency lines between different appointments such as the dependencies in a Gantt chart, I don't think this can be easily achieved with MindFusion.Scheduling for WinForms. The only option I can think of is to use custom drawing on the entire component (for example, handle the Control.Paint event). Then you can acquire the bounding rectangles of related appointments through the Calendar.GetItemBounds method and draw the dependencies as lines connecting those rectangles.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Meppy

You can custom-draw items using the same technique we discussed earlier. Set the Calendar.CustomDraw property to the appropriate value, then handle the Calendar.Draw event and perform the custom drawing in the event handler. In this case set Calendar.CustomDraw to CalendarItem. Keep in mind that filling an item with new color will cause the item contents (such as text, icons, etc) to be lost. So you may need to custom draw these too. Here is a small example that works relatively well in SingleMonth view:

if (e.Element == CustomDrawElements.CalendarItem)
{
      Rectangle left = new Rectangle(
            e.Bounds.X, e.Bounds.Y, e.Bounds.Width / 2, e.Bounds.Height);
      Rectangle right = new Rectangle(
            e.Bounds.X + e.Bounds.Width / 2, e.Bounds.Y, e.Bounds.Width - e.Bounds.Width / 2, e.Bounds.Height);
      e.Graphics.FillRectangle(Brushes.Orange, left);
      e.Graphics.FillRectangle(Brushes.PaleGoldenrod, right);

      Rectangle bounds = new Rectangle(
            e.Bounds.X, e.Bounds.Y, e.Bounds.Width - 1, e.Bounds.Height - 1);
      using (Pen pen = new Pen(e.Style.BorderLeftColor, 0))
            e.Graphics.DrawRectangle(pen, bounds);
      using (Brush brush = new SolidBrush(e.Style.HeaderTextColor))
      {
            StringFormat format = new StringFormat();
            format.Alignment = StringAlignment.Center;
            format.LineAlignment = StringAlignment.Center;
            e.Graphics.DrawString(e.Text, e.Style.HeaderFont, brush, bounds, format);
            format.Dispose();
      }
} 

Regarding the dependency lines, the only way (I can think of) to draw Gantt-like dependencies in WinForms is by using global custom drawing as described in my previous post.

Regards,
Meppy

The following code draws a dependency line between the first two appointments of calendar1. The code will work only when both appointments are visible on screen. Otherwise the returned bounding rectangles will not be accurate. You have to manually handle such cases.

Rectangle originBounds = calendar1.GetItemBounds(calendar1.Schedule.Items[0]);
Rectangle destBounds = calendar1.GetItemBounds(calendar1.Schedule.Items[1]);

if (originBounds.Width == 0 || originBounds.Height == 0 ||
      destBounds.Width == 0 || destBounds.Height == 0)
      return;

Point[] points = null;
if (originBounds.Right < destBounds.Left)
{
      points = new Point[]
      {
            new Point(originBounds.Right, originBounds.Top + originBounds.Height / 2),
            new Point(destBounds.Left, originBounds.Top + originBounds.Height / 2),
            new Point(destBounds.Left, destBounds.Top - calendar1.ItemSettings.MoveBandSize),
      };
}
else
{
      points = new Point[]
      {
      new Point(originBounds.Right, originBounds.Top + originBounds.Height / 2),
            new Point(originBounds.Right + 6, originBounds.Top + originBounds.Height / 2),
            new Point(originBounds.Right + 6, originBounds.Bottom + 1),
            new Point(destBounds.Left, originBounds.Bottom + 1),
            new Point(destBounds.Left, destBounds.Top - calendar1.ItemSettings.MoveBandSize),
      };
}

if (points != null)
      e.Graphics.DrawLines(Pens.Red, points);
 

Regards,
Meppy