Hiding Forms

[Kate Giacomozzi]

I have a form with 5 buttons, each time you click a button another form pops out. However, I want to hide any open forms (except the form with buttons) each time you click the button to make way for the new form. Example if I click button4 form6 pops out then if I click button2 I want form6 to hide and form4 to pop out and so on and so forth. Any help would be greating appreciated!!



This is what I have so far:

namespace WindowsFormsApplication5
{
    public partial class SideMenu : Form
    {
        public SideMenu()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }
 
        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
 
            Form3 newMDIChild1 = new Form3();
            newMDIChild1.MdiParent = this.MdiParent;
            newMDIChild1.Show();
 
 
 
        }
 
        private void button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            Form4 newMDIChild2 = new Form4();
            newMDIChild2.MdiParent = this.MdiParent;
            newMDIChild2.Show();
 
 
        }
 
        private void button3_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            Form5 newMDIChild3 = new Form5();
            newMDIChild3.MdiParent = this.MdiParent;
            newMDIChild3.Show();
 
        }
 
        private void button4_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            Form6 newMDIChild4 = new Form6();
            newMDIChild4.MdiParent = this.MdiParent;
            newMDIChild4.Show();
        }
 
        private void button5_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            Form7 newMDIChild5 = new Form7();
            newMDIChild5.MdiParent = this.MdiParent;
            newMDIChild5.Show();
        }   
 
 
    }
}

[GaryTexmo]

Ah, so the trouble is you want only one form to be shown at a time... you can open any form but you only want one (asides from your main form) visible at a time?

If I've understood you correctly (my apologies if I haven't!!) it shouldn't be too hard to do. If you're only ever intending to have a single form, why not just use a class member variable instead of creating object in every button click? All your forms inherit from the Form class, so you can make use of this. Your code would be something like...

public class ButtonForm : Form
{
  private Form m_subForm = null;
 
  ...
 
  private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
  {
    SwitchForms(new Form3);
  }
 
  ...
 
  private void SwitchForms(Form newForm)
  {
    if (m_subForm != null)
    {
      m_subForm.Hide();
      m_subForm.Dispose();
    }
 
    m_subForm = newForm;
    m_subForm.MdiParent = this.MdiParent;
    m_subForm.Show();
  }
 
  ...
}

Something like that. You'll note that this still destroys the old forms and creates new ones on every button click. If you want to preserve the state of each form and just show/hide on demand, you could look at keeping track of them in a Hashtable or a List structure. Then you can search those to see if the form already exists and show it while hiding all the others.

[Kate Giacomozzi]

Thank you so much for your help!!!!